For many English puritans, the new world represented new opportunities for the reification of reformation, if not a site within which they might begin to experience the conditions of the millennium itself. For many Irish Catholics, by contrast, the new world became associated with the experience of defeat, forced transportation, indentured service, cultural and religious loss. And yet, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the Atlantic experience of puritans and Catholics could be much less bifurcated than some of the established scholarly narratives have suggested: puritans and Catholics could co-exist within the same trans-Atlantic families; Catholics could prosper, just as puritans could experience financial decline; and Catholics and puritans could adopt, and exchange, similar kinds of belief structures and practical arrangements, even to the extent of being mistaken for each other. This volume investigates the history of Puritans and Catholics in the Atlantic world, 1600-1800.

For many English puritans, the new world represented new opportunities for the reification of reformation, if not a site within which they might begin to experience the conditions of the millennium itself. For many Irish Catholics, by contrast, the new world became associated with the experience of defeat, forced transportation, indentured service, cultural and religious loss. And yet, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the Atlantic experience of puritans and Catholics could be much less bifurcated than some of the established scholarly narratives have suggested: puritans and Catholics could co-exist within the same trans-Atlantic families; Catholics could prosper, just as puritans could experience financial decline; and Catholics and puritans could adopt, and exchange, similar kinds of belief structures and practical arrangements, even to the extent of being mistaken for each other. This volume investigates the history of Puritans and Catholics in the Atlantic world, 1600-1800.

Prophecy and millennial speculation are often seen as having played a key role in early European engagements with the new world, from Columbus’s use of the predictions of Joachim of Fiore, to the puritan ‘Errand into the Wilderness’. Yet examinations of such ideas have sometimes presumed an overly simplistic application of these beliefs in the lives of those who held to them. This book explores the way in which prophecy and eschatological ideas influenced poets, politicians, theologians, and ordinary people in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Chapters cover topics ranging from messianic claimants to the Portuguese crown to popular prophetic almanacs in eighteenth-century New England; from eschatological ideas in the poetry of George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet, to the prophetic speculation surrounding the Evangelical revivals. It highlights the ways in which prophecy and eschatology played a key role in the early modern Atlantic world.

This book builds upon research on the role of Catholicism in creating and strengthening a global Irish identity, complementing existing scholarship by adding a ‘Roman perspective’. It assesses the direct agency of the Holy See, its role in the Irish collective imagination, and the extent and limitations of Irish influence over the Holy See’s policies and decisions. Revealing the centrality of the Holy See in the development of a series of missionary connections across the Atlantic world and Rome, the chapters in this collection consider the formation, causes and consequences of these networks both in Ireland and abroad. The book offers a long durée perspective, covering both the early modern and modern periods, to show how Irish Catholicism expanded across continental Europe and over the Atlantic across three centuries. It also offers new insights into the history of Irish migration, exploring the position of the Irish Catholic clergy in Atlantic communities of Irish migrants.

Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World explores the creation, dissemination, and consumption of a specific type of news, ‘business news’, within early modern commercial news networks. The volume contains eleven case studies, written by scholars from a range of disciplines, which span the breadth of the early modern Atlantic from the first appearance of serial corantos in the seventeenth century to the United States’ Declaration of Independence in the late eighteenth century. These expert contributions showcase the range of innovative methodological and theoretical approaches which can be used to study business news, including social network analysis, textual analysis, and qualitative methods.

On his second Atlantic voyage, George Whitefield read lengthy quotations from a work of a deceased English cleric. Writing in his journal, he exclaimed, “[These words] deserve to be written in Letters of Gold.” Whitefield’s associate, the American Jonathan Edwards, concurred. That cleric was John Edwards, an anomaly in several respects: a self-proclaimed Calvinist who conformed to the Church of England at a time when most Calvinists left in the Great Ejection of 1662. In leading a public debate against prominent intellectuals of his day, including John Locke and Samuel Clarke, over the definition of orthodox Christianity, he allied himself with the same church leaders who decried his Calvinist theology. Edwards retired in his mid-fifties due to “ill health”—a retirement in which he wrote over forty scholarly books. At the heart of his concern was the unity and doctrinal orthodoxy of the church, themes over which contentious disputes have reverberated throughout church history. Saving the Church of England tells the story of why the church was in trouble and of John Edwards’s heroic effort to save it.