Early modern cathedrals have often found themselves falling between the historiographical cracks. While antiquarians and art historians have seen their early modern pasts as nothing more than periods of ‘desecration and pillage’, early modern historians have dismissed cathedrals as medieval ‘fossils’, irrelevant and impermeable to the religious upheavals of the English Reformation. Recent scholarship, however, has sought to address this view of cathedrals by reconsidering them within their religious, social, political and cultural contexts, thereby re-assessing the Reformation’s impact on cathedrals. Such work, however, has been mainly confined to the period before 1660, and has indeed seen the Restoration as a turning point, after which cathedrals’ once contested and controversial place within the Church and society was secured, as ‘Anglicanism’ flourished after the turmoil of Civil War.

Focusing on the period between the Restoration in 1660 and the death of Queen Anne in 1714, this thesis seeks to reassess this understanding of cathedrals’ later Stuart history as one of peaceful monotony, by considering how cathedrals fitted into debates about religious settlement, moral reformation, and the nature of the Church of England. While an understanding of cathedrals as centres of ceremonial worship arose with the Laudian ascendency in the 1630s, it is assumed this became the sole model for cathedrals after the Restoration. Although Restoration ‘high’ churchmen did indeed reassert this Laudian ideal, this did not go unchallenged. Earlier, competing visions of cathedrals survived into the Restoration period, notably as locales for evangelical reform. This study will suggest that the continued controversy surrounding their place and role within the Church of England raises doubts about the coherence and certainty of an ‘Anglican’ identity before the Act of Toleration. The significance of cathedrals evolved after 1689 in ways that also complicate our understanding of ‘Anglicanism’ in the long eighteenth century.