Colonial government, Pilgrims, the New England town, Native land, the background of religious toleration, and the changing memory recalling the Pilgrims – all are examined and stereotypical assumptions overturned in 15 essays by the foremost authority on the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony. Thorough research revises the story of colonists and of the people they displaced. Bangs’ book is required reading for the history of New England, Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts Natives, the Mennonite contribution to religious toleration in Europe and New England, and the history of commemoration, from paintings and pageants to living history and internet memes. If Pilgrims were radical, so is this book.

England's Second Reformation reassesses the religious upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England, situating them within the broader history of the Church of England and its earlier Reformations. Rather than seeing the Civil War years as a destructive aberration, Anthony Milton demonstrates how they were integral to (and indeed the climax of) the Church of England's early history. All religious groups – parliamentarian and royalist alike – envisaged changes to the pre-war church, and all were forced to adapt their religious ideas and practices in response to the tumultuous events. Similarly, all saw themselves and their preferred reforms as standing in continuity with the Church's earlier history. By viewing this as a revolutionary 'second Reformation', which necessarily involved everyone and forced them to reconsider what the established church was and how its past should be understood, Milton presents a compelling case for rethinking England's religious history.

The theme chosen for the seventh conference of Dutch and British historians - relations between Church and State in the two countries since the Reformation - cannot pretend to any originality. A subject so germane to the history of Europe, and indeed of those parts of the world colonized by Europeans and evangelized by the Christian churches, has naturally attracted the attention of numerous scholars. The particular attraction of this study of the action and reaction of Church and State in Britain and the Netherlands lies in the scope it offers historians and political scientists for making comparisons be tween two states, both of which endorsed the Protestant Reformation while rejecting absolutism. But the dissimilarities are quite as striking. In the Netherlands the Reformed Church came to hold a curiously equivocal position, being neither an established Church in the English sense nor an independent sect. Yet even after the formal separation of Church and State in 1796 and the rise to political prominence of Dutch Catholicism, ties of sentiment continued to link the Dutch nation and the Reformed Church for some time to come. Within England the Anglican Church maintained its constitutional standing as the established Church and its social position as the Church of the 'Establishment', though it had to recognize a non-episcopal estab lished Church of Scotland and accept its disestablishment in Ireland and Wales.

Explores the impact of legal ideas and legal consciousness on early modern English society and culture.