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This book traces the origins of interest in vernacular (“folk”) cultures in Britain and Ireland to religious controversies sparked by the Protestant Reformation, challenging the assumption that the Romantics were the first Protestants to discover a positive value in vernacular tradition. The Reformers attacked a multitude of everyday practices and beliefs relating to the natural world, seasonal festivities, and rites of passage. Yet, surprisingly, Protestantism’s emphasis on the importance of vernacular languages and its insistence that each nation had the right to religious autonomy in non-essentials resulted in a qualified acceptance of custom. A nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures developed, grounded in humanist Biblical and antiquarian scholarship, and informed by the theological and pastoral problems of the long period of religious instability that followed the Reformation. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglican and Scottish Presbyterian religious apologetics seamlessly incorporated new ideas about culture drawn from Enlightenment historicism and empiricism. Romantic literary primitivism and Romantic social thought, both radical and conservative, grew out of the religious concerns that shaped the cultural history of Britain and Ireland from the Reformation into the nineteenth century.