There has been dispute amongst social historians about whether only the more prosperous in village society were involved in religious practice. A group of historians working under Dr. Spufford's direction have produced a factual solution to this dispute by examining the taxation records of large groups of dissenters and churchwardens, and have established that both late Lollard and post-Restoration dissenting belief crossed the whole taxable spectrum. We can no longer speak of religion as being the prerogative of either 'weavers and threshers' or, on the other hand, of village elites. The group also examined the idea that dissent descended in families, and concluded that this was not only true but that such families were the least mobile population group so far examined in early modern England - probably because they were closely knit and tolerated in their communities. The cause of the apparent correlation of 'dissenting areas' and areas of early by-employment was also questioned. The group concludes that travelling merchants and carriers on the road network carried with them radical ideas and dissenting print, the content of which is examined, as well as goods. In her own substantial chapter Dr. Spufford draws together the pieces of the huge mosaic constructed by her team of contributors, adds radical ideas of her own, and disagrees with much of the prevailing wisdom on the function of religion in the late seventeenth century. Professor Patrick Collinson has contributed a critical conclusion to the volume. This is a book which breaks new ground, and which offers much original material for ecclesiastical, cultural, demographic, and economic historians of the period.

The study also examines many other facets of Quakerism - from the literacy rates of Quakers, and the level of persecution suffered by followers to the reasons for the sect's decline - and concludes with a survey of the changes that had overcome the movement since the heady days of birth."--Jacket.

A study of the fragmented nature of post-Reformation English Protestentism and the Dissenters who offered theological alternatives to Anglican traditions through Presbyterianism, Baptism, and Quakerism. This book explains the spread of these Dissenting traditions and the adoption of religious pluralism as a result of Protestant nonconformity.

Friends, Neighbours, Sinners shows the crucial role of religious difference in shaping English culture and society after 1689. By throwing into relief the cultural impact of England's unstable religious settlement, it highlights the centrality of religious difference to understanding social and cultural change after 1689.

Through the extensive diaries of Presbyterian minister Oliver Heywood, this book explores the role that individuals played in fashioning their religious communities during the Restoration, as England stumbled from persecution towards a limited toleration of Protestant dissenters.

Prior to the Quakers' large scale migration to Pennsylvania, Barbados had more Quakers than any other English colony. But on this island of sugar plantations, Quakers confronted material temptations and had to temper founder George Fox's admonitions regarding slavery with the demoralizing realities of daily life in a slave based economy one where even most Quakers owned slaves. In The Quaker Community on Barbados, Larry Gragg shows how the community dealt with these contradictions as it struggled to change the culture of the richest of England's seventeenth century colonies. Gragg has conducted meticulous research on two continents to re create the Barbados Quaker community. Drawing on wills, censuses, and levy books along with surviving letters, sermons, and journals, he tells how the Quakers sought to implement their beliefs in peace, simplicity, and equality in a place ruled by a planter class that had built its wealth on the backs of slaves. He reveals that Barbados Quakers were a critical part of a transatlantic network of Friends and explains how they established a ¿counterculture¿ on the island one that challenged the practices of the planter class and the class's dominance in island government, church, and economy. In this compelling study, Gragg focuses primarily on the seventeenth century when the Quakers were most numerous and active on Barbados. He tells how Friends sought to convert slaves and improve their working and living conditions. He describes how Quakers refused to fund the Anglican Church, take oaths, participate in the militia, or pay taxes to maintain forts and how they condemned Anglican clergymen, disrupted their services, and wrote papers critical of the established church. By the 1680s, Quakers were maintaining five meetinghouses and several cemeteries, paying for their own poor relief, and keeping their own records of births, deaths, and marriages. Gragg also tells of the severe challenges and penalties they faced for confronting and rejecting the dominant culture. With their civil disobedience and stand on slavery, Quakers on Barbados played an important role in the early British Empire but have been largely neglected by scholars. Gragg's work makes their contribution clear as it opens a new window on the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world.

Treacherous Faith offers a new and ambitious cross-disciplinary account of the ways writers from the early English Reformation to the Restoration generated, sustained, or questioned cultural anxieties about heresy and heretics. This book examines the dark, often brutal story of defining, constructing, and punishing heretics in early modern England, and especially the ways writers themselves contributed to or interrogated the politics of religious fear-mongering and demonizing. It illuminates the terrors and anxieties early modern writers articulated and the fantasies they constructed about pernicious heretics and pestilent heresies in response to the Reformation's shattering of Western Christendom. Treacherous Faith analyzes early modern writers who contributed to cultural fears about the contagion of heresy and engaged in the making of heretics, as well as writers who challenged the constructions of heretics and the culture of religious fear-mongering. The responses of early modern writers in English to the specter of heresy and the making of heretics were varied, complex, and contradictory, depending on their religious and political alignments. Some writers (for example, Thomas More, Richard Bancroft, and Thomas Edwards) used their rhetorical resourcefulness and inventiveness to contribute to the politics of heresy-making and the specter of cunning, diabolical heretics ravaging the Church, the state, and thousands of souls; others (for example, John Foxe) questioned within certain cultural limitations heresy-making processes and the violence and savagery that religious demonizing provoked; and some writers (for example, Anne Askew, John Milton, and William Walwyn) interrogated with great daring and inventiveness the politics of religious demonizing, heresy-making, and the cultural constructions of heretics. Treacherous Faith examines the complexities and paradoxes of the heresy-making imagination in early modern England: the dark fantasies, anxieties, terrors, and violence it was capable of generating, but also the ways the dreaded specter of heresy could stimulate the literary creativity of early modern authors engaging with it from diverse religious and political perspectives. Treacherous Faith is a major interdisciplinary study of the ways the literary imagination, religious fears, and demonizing interacted in the early modern world. This study of the early modern specter of heresy contributes to work in the humanities seeking to illuminate the changing dynamics of religious fear, the rhetoric of religious demonization, and the powerful ways the literary imagination represents and constructs religious difference.