"For pious converts to Christianity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England, all reality was shaped by religious devotion and biblical text. It is therefore not surprising that earnest believers who found themselves marginalized by their race or sex relied on their faith to reconcile the tension between the spiritual experience of rebirth and the social ordeal of exclusion and injustice. In 'Piety and dissent', Eileen Razzari Elrod examines the religious autobiographies of six early Americans who represented various sorts of marginality: John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and Jarena Lee, all of African or African American heritage; Samson Occom (Mohegan) and William Apess (Pequot); and Abigail Abbott Bailey, a white woman who was subjected to extreme domestic violence. Through close readings of these personal narratives, Elrod uncovers the complex rhetorical strategies employed by pious outsiders to challenge the particular kinds of oppression each experienced. She identifies recurrent ideals and images drawn from Scripture and Protestant tradition -- parables of liberation, rage, justice, and opposition to authority -- that allowed them to see resistance as a religious act and, more than that, imbued them with a sense of agency. What the life stories of these six individuals reveal, according to Elrod, is that conventional Christianity in early America was not the hegemonic force that church leaders at the time imagined and that many people since have believed it to be. Nor was there a clear distinction between personal piety and religious, social, and political resistance. To understand fully the role of religion in the early period of American letters, we must rethink some of our most fundamental assumptions about the function of Christian faith in the context of individual lives." --

This international and interdisciplinary volume investigates Protestant devotional identities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Divided into two sections, the book examines the ‘sites’ where these identities were forged – the academy, printing house, household, theatre and prison – and the ‘types’ of texts that expressed them – spiritual autobiographies, religious poetry and writings tied to the ars moriendi – providing a broad analysis of social, material and literary forms of devotion during England’s Long Reformation. Through archival and cutting-edge research, a detailed picture of ‘lived religion’ emerges, which re-evaluates the pietistic acts and attitudes of well-known and recently discovered figures. To those studying and teaching religion and identity in early modern England, and anyone interested in the history of religious self-expression, these chapters offer a rich and rewarding read.

In early modern times, religious affiliation was often communicated through bodily practices. Despite various attempts at definition, these practices remained extremely fluid and lent themselves to individual appropriation and to evasion of church and state control. Because bodily practices prompted much debate, they serve as a useful starting point for examining denominational divisions, allowing scholars to explore the actions of smaller and more radical divergent groups. The focus on bodies and conflicts over bodily practices are the starting point for the contributors to this volume who depart from established national and denominational historiographies to probe the often-ambiguous phenomena occurring at the interstices of confessional boundaries. In this way, the authors examine a variety of religious living conditions, socio-cultural groups, and spiritual networks of early modern Europe and the Americas. The cases gathered here skillfully demonstrate the diverse ways in which regional and local differences affected the interpretation of bodily signs. This book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern Europe and the Americas, as well as those interested in religious and gender history, and the history of dissent.

Dr Butler provides a new interpretation of the cristero war (1926-29) which divided Mexico's peasantry into rival camps loyal to the Catholic Church (cristero) or the Revolution (agrarista). This book puts religion at the heart of our understanding of the revolt by showing how peasant allegiances often resulted from genuinely popular cultural and religious antagonisms. It challenges the assumption that Mexican peasants in the 1920s shared religious outlooks and that their behaviour was mainly driven by political and material factors. Focusing on the state of Michoacán in western-central Mexico, the volume seeks to integrate both cultural and structural lines of inquiry. First charting the uneven character of Michoacán's historical formation in the late colonial period and the nineteenth century, Dr Butler shows how the emergence of distinct agrarian regimes and political cultures was later associated with varying popular responses to post-revolutionary state formation in the areas of educational and agrarian reform. At the same time, it is argued that these structural trends were accompanied by increasingly clear divergences in popular religious cultures, including lay attitudes to the clergy, patterns of religious devotion and deviancy, levels of sacramental participation, and commitment to militant 'social' Catholicism. As peasants in different communities developed distinct parish identities, so the institutional conflict between Church and state acquired diverse meanings and provoked violently contradictory popular responses. Thus the fires of revolt burned all the more fiercely because they inflamed a countryside which - then as now - was deeply divided in matters of faith as well as politics. Based on oral testimonies and careful searches of dozens of ecclesiastical and state archives, this study makes an important contribution to the religious history of the Mexican Revolution.

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.