Although much of Protestant Reformation history focuses on movements in Germany, Switzerland, and France, during the 16th Century the Netherlands was the site of some of the earliest instances of pre-reformation religious dissent. During the 1520s, no "figurehead" led the movement in the Netherlands; instead six theological tracts by six individual scholars voiced religious dissent. These dissenting theological ideas were based on either Northern Renaissance or Biblical Humanist scholarship--most notably Erasmus--or the writing and monastic students of Martin Luther. These tracts emphasized the need for renewed biblical study; spiritual rather than literal interpretations of the Medieval Church's rituals; re-evaluation of the status quo; and a revised interpretation of the authority of the Bible. This period of inquiry and religious and social unrest was the foundation for impending changes in the Netherlands, and the rest of Europe. Using primary historical data from the trials of suspected heretics and the works of the aforementioned theologians, only one of which has appeared in English, Pre-Reformation Religious Dissent in the Netherlands, 1518-1530 is a comprehensive study of role of the Netherlands in the Protestant Reformation.

Dissenting Daughters reveals that devout women made vital contributions to the spread and practice of the Reformed faith in the Dutch Republic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The six women at the heart of this study: Cornelia Teellinck, Susanna Teellinck, Anna Maria van Schurman, Sara Nevius, Cornelia Leydekker, and Henrica van Hoolwerff, were influential members of networks known for supporting a religious revival known as the Further Reformation. These women earned the support and appreciation of their religious leaders, friends, and relatives by seizing the tools offered by domestic religious study and worship and forming alliances with prominent ministers including Willem Teellinck, Gijsbertus Voetius, Wilhelmus à Brakel, and Melchior Leydekker as well as with other well-connected, well-educated women. They deployed their talents to bolster the Dutch Reformed Church from 1572, the first year its members could publicly organize, to the death of this book's last surviving subject Cornelia Leydekker in 1725. In return for their adoption of religious teachings that constricted them in many ways, they gained the authority to minister to their family members, their female friends, and a broader audience of men and women during domestic worship as well as through their written works. These "dissenting daughters" vehemently defended their faith - against Spanish and French Catholics, as well as their neighbors, politicians, and ministers within the Dutch Republic whom they judged to be lax and overly tolerant of sinful behavior, finding ways to flourish among the strictest orthodox believers within the Dutch Reformed Church.

Dutch society has enjoyed a reputation, or notoriety, for permissiveness from the sixteenth century to present times. The Dutch Republic in the Golden Age was the only society that tolerated religious dissenters of all persuasions in early modern Europe, despite being committed to a strictly Calvinist public Church. Professors R. Po-chia Hsia and Henk van Nierop have brought together a group of leading historians from the US, the UK and the Netherlands to probe the history and myth of this Dutch tradition of religious tolerance. This 2002 collection of outstanding essays reconsiders and revises contemporary views of Dutch tolerance. Taken as a whole, the volume's innovative scholarship offers unexpected insights into this important topic in religious and cultural history.

The settlers of New Netherland were obligated to uphold religious toleration as a legal right by the Dutch Republic's founding document, the 1579 Union of Utrecht, which stated that "everyone shall remain free in religion and that no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion." For early American historians this statement, unique in the world at its time, lies at the root of American pluralism. New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty offers a new reading of the way tolerance operated in colonial America. Using sources in several languages and looking at laws and ideas as well as their enforcement and resistance, Evan Haefeli shows that, although tolerance as a general principle was respected in the colony, there was a pronounced struggle against it in practice. Crucial to the fate of New Netherland were the changing religious and political dynamics within the English empire. In the end, Haefeli argues, the most crucial factor in laying the groundwork for religious tolerance in colonial America was less what the Dutch did than their loss of the region to the English at a moment when the English were unusually open to religious tolerance. This legacy, often overlooked, turns out to be critical to the history of American religious diversity. By setting Dutch America within its broader imperial context, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty offers a comprehensive and nuanced history of a conflict integral to the histories of the Dutch republic, early America, and religious tolerance.

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.