The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I The Post-Reformation Era, 1559-1689

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.

John Coffey, Professor of Early Modern History, University of Leicester

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, Tom Charlton, and Tom Cooper on a scholarly edition of Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae, 5 vols (Oxford, 2020).

1. Presbyterianism in Elizabethan & Early Stuart England, Polly Ha
2. Presbyterians in the English Revolution, Elliot Vernon
3. Presbyterians in the Restoration, George Southcombe
4. Congregationalists, Tim Cooper
5. Separatists and Baptists, Michael A. G. Haykin
6. Early Quakerism and its Origins, Ariel Hessayon
7. The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile, 1575-1688, Cory Cotter
8. Scotland, R. Scott Spurlock
9. Ireland, Crawford Gribben
10. Wales, 1587-1689, Lloyd Bowen
11. Dissent in New England, Francis J. Bremer
12. Colonial Quakerism, Andrew R. Murphy and Adrian Chastain Weimer
13. Dissent in the Parishes, W. J. Sheils
14. Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration, Jacqueline Rose
15. The Empowerment of Dissent: The Puritan Revolution, Bernard Capp
16. The Print Culture of Nonconformity: From Martin Marprelate to Reliquiae Baxterianae, N. H. Keeble
17. The Bible and Theology, John Coffey
18. Sacraments and Worship, Susan Hardman Moore
19. Sermons and Preaching, David J. Appleby
20. Women and Gender, Rachel Adock
21. Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches, Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb