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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.
During the 16th century’s tumultuous years of religious reformation and revolution, Pilgram Marpeck consistently but discreetly stood up to the ruling powers, calling for freedom of religion and separation of church and state. Walter Klaassen and William Klassen, editors of The Writings of Pilgram Marpeck, have deeply mined Marpeck’s writing and dialogue with other Reformation leaders. They place his life, work, and theology in the context of his violent, changing times. This thorough biography shows how Marpeck, perhaps more than any other early Anabaptist figure, helped lay the theoretical and practical foundations of the believers church.
This volume is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on how Reformed theology and ecclesiology related to one of the most consequential issues between the Elizabethan Settlement (1559) and the Hanoverian Succession (1714), namely conformity to the Church of England. This volume enriches scholarly understandings of how Reformed identity was understood in the Tudor and Stuart periods, and how it influenced both clerical and lay attitudes towards the English Church’s government, liturgy and doctrine. In a reflection of how established religion pervaded all aspects of civic life in the early modern world and was sharply contested within both ecclesiastical and political spheres, this volume includes chapters that focus variously on the ecclesio-political, liturgical, and doctrinal aspects of conformity.
This wide-ranging and original book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Church of England in the long eighteenth century. It explores the nature of the Restoration ecclesiastical regime, the character of the clerical profession, the quality of the clergy's pastoral work, and the question of Church reform through a detailed study of the diocese of the archbishops of Canterbury. In so doing the book covers the political, social, economic, cultural, intellectual and pastoral functions of the Church and, by adopting a broad chronological span, it allows the problems and difficulties often ascribed to the eighteenth-century Church to be viewed as emerging from the seventeenth century and as continuing well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, the author argues that some of the traditional periodizations and characterisations of conventional religious history need modification. Much of the evidence presented here indicates that clergy in the one hundred and seventy years after 1660 were preoccupied with difficulties which had concerned their forebears and would concern their successors. In many ways, clergy in the diocese of Canterbury between 1660 and 1828 continued the work of seventeenth-century clergy, particularly in following through, and in some instances instigating, the pastoral and professional aims of the Reformation, as well as participating in processes relating to Church reform, and further anticipating some of the deals of the Evangelical and Oxford Movements. Reluctance to recognise this has led historians to neglect the strengths of the Church between the Restoration and the 1830s, which, it is argued, should not be judged primarily for its failure to attain the ideals of these other movements, but as an institution possessing its own coherent and positive rationale.
The eight essays in this volume approach the study of the Radical Reformation from new perspectives and challenge some of the basic assumptions of the field. Some critique and problematize the typologies developed to distinguish Reformation radicals from each other and from the Magisterial Reformers. Others apply an equally iconoclastic approach to existing scholarship on the relationship between religious change and socio-political radicalism in early modern Europe. A final group concentrate specifically on revising the history of Anabaptism by tracing its long-term development across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and recovering the lives of normal Anabaptists to write a true social history of the movement that avoids relying on the biographies and prescriptive writings of its leadership.
This contextualised study illuminates the oft-misunderstood aspects of Richard Baxter's ecclesiology: purity, unity, and liberty. In doing so, it sheds further light on the nature of seventeenth-century English Puritanism, and the quest for the true church and the corresponding conflicts between the Laudians and Puritans.
Penny Pritchard is a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature, and has taught at the University of Hertfordshire since completing her PhD in 2006. Both her doctoral thesis (entitled ‘Defoe, Rhetoric, and Nonconformity’) and MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies were undertaken at the University of East Anglia. Her first book (The Long Eighteenth-Century: Literature from 1660 to 1790) was published by York Press in 2010, and she has written extensively on Defoe and early modern religious writing in academic journals and chapter collections.
By Bartholomew's Day, 24 August, 1662, all ministers and schoolmasters in England and Wales were required by the Act of Uniformity to have given their "unfeigned assent and consent" to the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. On theological grounds nearly two thousand ministers--approximately one fifth of the clergy of the Church of England--refused to comply and thereby forfeited their livings. This book has been written to commemorate the 350th Anniversary of the Great Ejectment. In Part One three early modern historians provide accounts of the antecedents and aftermath of the ejectment in England and Wales, while in Part Two the case is advanced that the negative responses of the ejected ministers to the legal requirements of the Act of Uniformity were rooted in positive doctrinal convictions that are of continuing ecumenical significance.
This volume analyses the form, structure and genre of a selection of non-fictional works by Daniel Defoe. Directing our scholarly gaze away from the much studied novels, the essays explore the rhetorical strategies and generic inventiveness on display in Defoe’s better known non-fictional texts, such as The Shortest Way with the Dissenters and A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, and some of his lesser known publications, such as his Complete English Tradesman and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions. What emerges from the collection is the picture of an author who responded to early eighteenth-century debates and events with outstanding authorial skill and energy, and to whom matters of form and style were of great importance.
By their very nature, traditions are diverse. This is particularly the case with theological traditions, even including those cases where they have been named for a single individual (e.g. Augustinianism, Thomism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism). In the eras of the Reformation and of Reformed orthodoxy there was intense theological debate, leading to confessional identity and confessional boundaries; hence the Remonstrant controversy in the early seventeenth century. What the essays of this volume look at, however, are the debates that took place within the Reformed theological tradition, particularly within Puritan England. Some of the debates considered here threatened to rise to a confessional level whereas others were not so serious insofar as they did not press on confessional boundaries. The Puritan tradition surveyed in these essays looks at both major and minor intra-Reformed debates. Most of these debates analyzed have been passed over in the older scholarship in its quest to find the few true Calvinians to oppose to the so-called Calvinists. By contrast, none of the studies included in the present volume brands one side of a seventeenth-century debate as un-Calvinian or identifies an alteration of doctrinal perspective as a declension from Reformation-era purity. Calvin no longer appears as a norm, although he does appear, with other Reformers, as an antecedent of certain lines of argument. Lastly, the essays document the ongoing concern among Reformed theologians to further the Reformation cause. In this pursuit, Reformed theologians, as they did during the time of the Reformation theologians, often found themselves disagreeing on a number of theological doctrines.