Creating Communities In Restoration England

This book explores the nature of religious community at a time when, by some accounts, it was in its death throes. Many have argued that early modern communities suffered too much damage to survive, as cumulative assaults of the Reformation, the rise of Puritanism, and the denominational fragmentation of the Interregnum and Restoration destroyed parish unity forever. Without minimizing the significance of these events, this book argues for the resilience of religious community. By analyzing the religious networks of Oliver Heywood (1630-1702), a strategically-placed and well-documented Presbyterian minister, this work illustrates the flexibility of the communal ideal in the face of the challenges presented by the Long Reformation. Through Heywood’s eyes we watch the inhabitants of the northern parish of Halifax as they cross, and at times blur, the denominational boundaries that loom large both in the heated rhetoric of the time and in recent historiography.

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.

“The rise and fall of transatlantic puritanism is told through political, theological, and personal conflict in this exceptional history.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) Begun in the mid-sixteenth century by Protestant nonconformists keen to reform England’s church and society while saving their own souls, the puritan movement was a major catalyst in the great cultural changes that transformed the early modern world. Providing a uniquely broad transatlantic perspective, this groundbreaking volume traces puritanism’s tumultuous history from its initial attempts to reshape the Church of England to its establishment of godly republics in both England and America and its demise at the end of the seventeenth century. Shedding new light on puritans whose impact was far-reaching as well as on those who left only limited traces behind them, Michael Winship delineates puritanism’s triumphs and tribulations and shows how the puritan project of creating reformed churches working closely with intolerant godly governments evolved and broke down over time in response to changing geographical, political, and religious exigencies. “Among the fairest and most readable accounts of the glorious failure that was trans-Atlantic Puritanism.” --The Wall Street Journal “Exhilarating popular history . . . convincingly captures in one bold retelling decades of scholarship on Puritanism’s origins, developments and characteristics” —Times Literary Supplement “Winship has established himself as a leading authority on the history of the Puritans. While many works have focused on a specific aspect of Puritan history, . . . there are fewer works that show Puritanism as a multinational movement in Europe and the Americas. This book fills those gaps.” —Library Journal A Choice Outstanding Academic Titles

This book provides a new perspective on book history, with essays from leading scholars showing how communities of writers, publishers and readers across early modern Europe shaped the consumption of print.

Mark Goldie's authoritative and highly readable introduction to the political and religious landscape of Britain during the turbulent era of later Stuart rule.

A study of the rise and decline of puritanism in England and New England that focuses on the role of godly men and women. It explores the role of family devotions, lay conferences, prophesying and other means by which the laity influenced puritan belief and practice, and the efforts of the clergy to reduce lay power in the seventeenth century.

Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England addresses the rich, complex, and varied nature of 'church life' experienced by England's Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians during the seventeenth century. Spanning the period from the English Revolution to the Glorious Revolution, and beyond, the contributors examine the social, political, and religious character of England's 'gathered' churches and reformed parishes: how pastors and their congregations interacted; how Dissenters related to their meetings as religious communities; and what the experience of church life was like for ordinary members as well as their ministers, including notably John Owen and Richard Baxter alongside less well-known figures, such as Ebenezer Chandler. Moving beyond the religious experience of the solitary individual, often exemplified by conversion, Church Life redefines the experience of Dissent, concentrating instead on the collective concerns of a communally-centred church life through a wide spectrum of issues: from questions of liberty and pastoral reform to matters of church discipline and respectability. With a substantial introduction that puts into context the key concepts of 'church life' and the 'Dissenting experience', the contributors offer fresh ways of understanding Protestant Dissent in seventeenth-century England: through differences in ecclesiology and pastoral theory, and via the buildings in which Dissent was nurtured to the building-up of Dissent during periods of civil war, persecution, and revolution. They draw on a broad range of printed and archival materials: from the minutes of the Westminster Assembly to the manuscript church books of early Dissenting congregations.

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.