William Gibson is Emeritus Professor at Oxford Brookes University, and member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford. He has written widely on religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

• Introduction by William Gibson, Laura Stevens and Sabine Volk-Birke.Denise M. Kohn: ‘Rowlandson’s “Cover Story”: The Revision of Private Devotional Practice into Public Narrative.’Elena Marasinova: ‘The Prayer of an Empress and the Eighteenth Century Russian Death Penalty Moratorium’Linda Meditz: ‘The Captive at Prayer: Cross-Cultural Trauma as Revealed in the Diary of Stephen Williams’.Penny Pritchard: ‘The Eye of a Needle: Commemorating the ‘Godly Merchant’ in the Early Modern Funeral Sermon.’Laura Stevens: ‘Mary’s Magnificat in Eighteenth Century Britain’Sabine Volk-Birke: ‘“The Order and Methods of Nosegays”: Imagining Readers in François de Sales's Introduction à la vie dévote (1609) and its eighteenth century English adaptations.’