Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and Dissent, emphasising that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, separatists werefew in number, and Dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640-60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiasticalreform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of two thousand Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. The story of Dissent is thus bound up with the contest for the established Church, not simply a heroic tale of persecuted minorities contending for religious toleration.Nevertheless, in the half century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominationaltraditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.

...it provides a useful introduction to Protestant dissenting traditions in the early modern period for students encountering the subject for the first time but remains an essential resource for scholars wanting a focused orientation to a specific sub-field of Protestant dissent., this work stands out in the way in which it highlights the richness and diversity of each dissenting tradition, avoiding the monolithic approach that many works addressing confessional identities tend toward ... This volume is an essential compendium for and welcome addition to early modern religious studies, bringing a fresh approach and a much-needed reassessment of confessional identity in early modern Protestantism., Excellent volume, ...this work stands out in the way in which it highlights the richness and diversity of each dissenting tradition, avoiding the monolithic approach that many works addressing confessional identities tend toward. The scope of topics featured in the second half of the volume conveys the multi-faceted, nuanced world of Protestant dissent, reminding us that dissent involved and affected multiple layers of religious and social life. This volume is an essential compendium for and welcome addition to early modern religious studies, bringing a fresh approach and a much-needed reassessment of confessional identity in early modern Protestantism., This is a handsome and weighty book ... It repays careful and repeated reading.

John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester. He has published widely on the history of Protestantism in Britain and America, and is the author of Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689 (2000), and Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. (2014). He co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (2008), and has worked with N.H. Keeble, TomCharlton, and Tom Cooper on a scholarly edition of Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae, 5 vols (Oxford, 2020).