Download or read book The World of Rural Dissenters 1520 1725 written by Margaret Spufford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-03-16 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been dispute amongst social historians about whether only the more prosperous in village society were involved in religious practice. A group of historians working under Dr. Spufford's direction have produced a factual solution to this dispute by examining the taxation records of large groups of dissenters and churchwardens, and have established that both late Lollard and post-Restoration dissenting belief crossed the whole taxable spectrum. We can no longer speak of religion as being the prerogative of either 'weavers and threshers' or, on the other hand, of village elites. The group also examined the idea that dissent descended in families, and concluded that this was not only true but that such families were the least mobile population group so far examined in early modern England - probably because they were closely knit and tolerated in their communities. The cause of the apparent correlation of 'dissenting areas' and areas of early by-employment was also questioned. The group concludes that travelling merchants and carriers on the road network carried with them radical ideas and dissenting print, the content of which is examined, as well as goods. In her own substantial chapter Dr. Spufford draws together the pieces of the huge mosaic constructed by her team of contributors, adds radical ideas of her own, and disagrees with much of the prevailing wisdom on the function of religion in the late seventeenth century. Professor Patrick Collinson has contributed a critical conclusion to the volume. This is a book which breaks new ground, and which offers much original material for ecclesiastical, cultural, demographic, and economic historians of the period.
Download or read book The Quakers in English Society 1655 1725 written by Adrian Davies and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-02-17 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early Quakers denounced the clergy and social élite but how did that affect Friends' relationships with others? Drawing upon the insights of sociologists and anthropologists, this lively and original study sets out to discover the social consequences of religious belief. Why did the sect appoint its own midwives to attend Quaker women during confinement? Was animosity to Quakerism so great that Friends were excluded from involvement in parish life? And to what extent were the remarkably high literacy rates of Quakers attributable to the Quaker faith or wider social forces? Using a wide range of primary source material, this study demonstrates that Quakers were not the marginal and isolated people which contemporaries and historians often portrayed. Indeed the sect had a profound impact not only upon members but more widely by encouraging a greater tolerance of diversity in early modern society.
Download or read book A Miracle Mirrored written by C. A. Davids and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 1996 comparative study of the Netherlands from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.
Download or read book The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions Volume I written by John Coffey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-29 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 were few 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 ecclesiastical reform. 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 denominational traditions 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.
Download or read book Friends Neighbours Sinners written by Carys Brown and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-04 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friends, Neighbours, Sinners shows the crucial role of religious difference in shaping English culture and society after 1689. By throwing into relief the cultural impact of England's unstable religious settlement, it highlights the centrality of religious difference to understanding social and cultural change after 1689.
Download or read book Creating Communities in Restoration England written by Samuel I. Thomas and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the extensive diaries of Presbyterian minister Oliver Heywood, this book explores the role that individuals played in fashioning their religious communities during the Restoration, as England stumbled from persecution towards a limited toleration of Protestant dissenters.
Download or read book The Quaker Community on Barbados written by Larry Dale Gragg and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the Quakers' large scale migration to Pennsylvania, Barbados had more Quakers than any other English colony. But on this island of sugar plantations, Quakers confronted material temptations and had to temper founder George Fox's admonitions regarding slavery with the demoralizing realities of daily life in a slave based economy one where even most Quakers owned slaves. In The Quaker Community on Barbados, Larry Gragg shows how the community dealt with these contradictions as it struggled to change the culture of the richest of England's seventeenth century colonies. Gragg has conducted meticulous research on two continents to re create the Barbados Quaker community. Drawing on wills, censuses, and levy books along with surviving letters, sermons, and journals, he tells how the Quakers sought to implement their beliefs in peace, simplicity, and equality in a place ruled by a planter class that had built its wealth on the backs of slaves. He reveals that Barbados Quakers were a critical part of a transatlantic network of Friends and explains how they established a ¿counterculture¿ on the island one that challenged the practices of the planter class and the class's dominance in island government, church, and economy. In this compelling study, Gragg focuses primarily on the seventeenth century when the Quakers were most numerous and active on Barbados. He tells how Friends sought to convert slaves and improve their working and living conditions. He describes how Quakers refused to fund the Anglican Church, take oaths, participate in the militia, or pay taxes to maintain forts and how they condemned Anglican clergymen, disrupted their services, and wrote papers critical of the established church. By the 1680s, Quakers were maintaining five meetinghouses and several cemeteries, paying for their own poor relief, and keeping their own records of births, deaths, and marriages. Gragg also tells of the severe challenges and penalties they faced for confronting and rejecting the dominant culture. With their civil disobedience and stand on slavery, Quakers on Barbados played an important role in the early British Empire but have been largely neglected by scholars. Gragg's work makes their contribution clear as it opens a new window on the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world.
Download or read book Treacherous Faith written by David Loewenstein and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-08-30 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Treacherous Faith offers a new and ambitious cross-disciplinary account of the ways writers from the early English Reformation to the Restoration generated, sustained, or questioned cultural anxieties about heresy and heretics. This book examines the dark, often brutal story of defining, constructing, and punishing heretics in early modern England, and especially the ways writers themselves contributed to or interrogated the politics of religious fear-mongering and demonizing. It illuminates the terrors and anxieties early modern writers articulated and the fantasies they constructed about pernicious heretics and pestilent heresies in response to the Reformation's shattering of Western Christendom. Treacherous Faith analyzes early modern writers who contributed to cultural fears about the contagion of heresy and engaged in the making of heretics, as well as writers who challenged the constructions of heretics and the culture of religious fear-mongering. The responses of early modern writers in English to the specter of heresy and the making of heretics were varied, complex, and contradictory, depending on their religious and political alignments. Some writers (for example, Thomas More, Richard Bancroft, and Thomas Edwards) used their rhetorical resourcefulness and inventiveness to contribute to the politics of heresy-making and the specter of cunning, diabolical heretics ravaging the Church, the state, and thousands of souls; others (for example, John Foxe) questioned within certain cultural limitations heresy-making processes and the violence and savagery that religious demonizing provoked; and some writers (for example, Anne Askew, John Milton, and William Walwyn) interrogated with great daring and inventiveness the politics of religious demonizing, heresy-making, and the cultural constructions of heretics. Treacherous Faith examines the complexities and paradoxes of the heresy-making imagination in early modern England: the dark fantasies, anxieties, terrors, and violence it was capable of generating, but also the ways the dreaded specter of heresy could stimulate the literary creativity of early modern authors engaging with it from diverse religious and political perspectives. Treacherous Faith is a major interdisciplinary study of the ways the literary imagination, religious fears, and demonizing interacted in the early modern world. This study of the early modern specter of heresy contributes to work in the humanities seeking to illuminate the changing dynamics of religious fear, the rhetoric of religious demonization, and the powerful ways the literary imagination represents and constructs religious difference.
Download or read book Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism 1650 1750 written by Naomi Pullin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quaker women were unusually active participants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural and religious exchange, as ministers, missionaries, authors and spiritual leaders. Drawing upon documentary evidence, with a focus on women's personal writings and correspondence, Naomi Pullin explores the lives and social interactions of Quaker women in the British Atlantic between 1650 and 1750. Through a comparative methodology, focused on Britain and the North American colonies, Pullin examines the experiences of both those women who travelled and preached and those who stayed at home. The book approaches the study of gender and religion from a new perspective by placing women's roles, relationships and identities at the centre of the analysis. It shows how the movement's transition from 'sect to church' enhanced the authority and influence of women within the movement and uncovers the multifaceted ways in which female Friends at all levels were active participants in making and sustaining transatlantic Quakerism.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan written by Michael Davies and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan is the most extensive volume of original essays ever published on the seventeenth-century nonconformist preacher and writer, John Bunyan. Its thirty-eight chapters examine Bunyan's life and works, their religious and historical contexts, and the critical reception of his writings, in particular his allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress. Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, it provides unparalleled scope and expertise, ranging from literary theory to religious history and from theology to post-colonial criticism. The Handbook is structured in four sections. The first, 'Contexts', deals with the historical Bunyan in relation to various aspects of his life, background, and work as a nonconformist: from basic facts of biography to the nature of his church at Bedford, his theology, and the religious and political cultures of seventeenth-century Dissent. Part 2 considers Bunyan's literary output: from his earliest printed tracts to his posthumously published works. Offering discrete chapters on Bunyan's major works - Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Pilgrim's Progress, Parts I and II (1678; 1684); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), and The Holy War (1682) - this section nevertheless covers Bunyan's oeuvre in its entirety: controversial and pastoral, narrative and poetic. Section 3, 'Directions in Criticism', engages with Bunyan in literary critical terms, focusing on his employment of form and language and on theoretical approaches to his writings: from psychoanalytic to post-secular criticism. Section 4, 'Journeys', tackles some of the ways in which Bunyan's works, and especially The Pilgrim's Progress, have travelled throughout the world since the late seventeenth century, assessing Bunyan's place within key literary periods and their distinctive developments: from the eighteenth-century novel to the writing of 'empire'.
Download or read book Revelation Restored written by Warren Johnston and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the nature of apocalyptic and millennial beliefs that reveals concerns prominent in England in the early seventeenth century had not abated after 1660.
Download or read book Displaced Persons Conditions of Exile in European Culture written by Sharon Ouditt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and intellectually vigorous conspectus of studies approaches the subject of exile from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The contributions to this volume give due attention to the twentieth century migratory phenomena, theorised by Edward Said, Julia Kristeva and Salman Rushdie. They also show that the discourse and experience of exile is not the stuff of modernity alone. The volume illustrates that the waning of the Middle Ages, Reformation and Restoration politics, and the importation of Egyptian mummies into a nineteenth-century England hungry for imperial exotica reveal displacement, dislocation, otherness and the uncanniness of observing strangers-on-display to have long been part of European cultural currency. The essays range across a variety of disciplines: literary studies, modern languages, history of science, philosophy and museum studies.
Download or read book Print Culture and the Early Quakers written by Kate Peters and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-24 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early Quaker movement was remarkable for its prolific use of the printing press. Carefully orchestrated by a handful of men and women who were the movement's leaders, printed tracts were an integral feature of the rapid spread of Quaker ideas in the 1650s. Drawing on very rich documentary evidence, this book examines how and why Quakers were able to make such effective use of print. As a crucial element in an extensive proselytising campaign, printed tracts enabled the emergence of the Quaker movement as a uniform, national phenomenon. The book explores the impressive organization underpinning Quaker pamphleteering and argues that the early movement should not be dismissed as a disillusioned spiritual remnant of the English Revolution, but was rather a purposeful campaign which sought, and achieved, effective dialogue with both the body politic and society at large.
Download or read book After the Civil Wars written by John Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study of Restoration England from the point of view of both rulers and ruled, this volume offers a vital reappraisal of seventeenth century England. The civil wars had a traumatic effect on the English people: memories of bloodshed and destruction and the ultimate horror of the execution of Charles I continued to be invoked for decades afterwards. It is often argued that the political and religious fissures created by the wars divided English society irrevocably, as demonstrated by the later bitter conflict between the Whig and Tory parties. After the Civil Wars proposes instead that although there was political conflict, Charles II's reign was not a continuation of the divisions of the civil wars.
Download or read book The Art of Hearing written by Arnold Hunt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-02 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses the effectiveness of the sermon as a key means of transmitting religious ideas.
Download or read book England s Long Reformation written by Nicholas Tyacke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays examine the long-term impact of the Protestant reformation in England. This text should be of interest to historians of early modern England and reformation studies.
Download or read book Charitable Hatred written by Alexandra Walsham and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-05 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charitable Hatred offers a challenging new perspective on religious tolerance and intolerance in early modern England. Setting aside traditional models charting a linear progress from persecution to toleration, it emphasizes instead the complex interplay between these two impulses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
