In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new-found love of spontaneity transformed Christian worship and revolutionized the Enlightenment's "culture of sensibility." Rituals of Spontaneity tells the story of how and why spontaneity came to be so revered. Using archival material and works of Bunyan, Shaftesbury, Goldsmith, Smart and Wordsworth, Branch shows that the rise of spontaneity was intimately connected to the forces of commerce and science at the dawn of the Enlightenment. By focusing on the language in which spontaneity was defended and on its psychological repercussions, Rituals of Spontaneity challenges previous understanding of secularization and demonstrates the deep, often troubling connections between religion and secularism in modernity. Winner of the Book of the Year Award for the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Rich, well-argued, and frequently fascinating... The book yields particularly useful insights about anxieties over commercialized religious culture... and the paradoxically regimented nature of much early-modern "spontaneity."... Recommended. ― CHOICE Branch is an archaeologist intent on uncovering the history of the notion of spontaneity. From Bunyan's spirit-prompted prayers to Wordsworth's natural expression, this is the story of how a culture invented spontaneity and made its performance the chief measure of sincerity in matters religious, poetic, economic and political. -- Thomas H. Luxon, Dartmouth College Lori Branch (Ph. D. Indiana University) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa.