This book explores the role of children and young people within early modern England's Catholic minority. It examines Catholic attempts to capture the next generation, Protestant reactions to these initiatives, and the social, legal and political contexts in which young people formed, maintained and attempted to explain their religious identity.

John Seed provides a rich and empirically grounded account of relations between religious dissent, historical writing, public memory and political identity in 18th-century England.

Rational Dissent was a branch of Protestant religious nonconformity which emerged to prominence in England between c. 1770 and c. 1800. While small, the movement provoked fierce opposition from both Anglicans and Orthodox Dissenters.

Religious toleration appears near the top of any short list of core liberal democratic values. Theorists from John Locke to John Rawls emphasize important interconnections between the principles of toleration, constitutional government, and the rule of law. Conscience and Community revisits the historical emergence of religious liberty in the Anglo-American tradition, looking deeper than the traditional emergence of toleration to find not a series of self-evident or logically connected expansions but instead a far more complex evolution. Murphy argues that contemporary liberal theorists have misunderstood and misconstrued the actual historical development of toleration in theory and practice. Murphy approaches the concept through three "myths" about religious toleration: that it was opposed only by ignorant, narrow-minded persecutors; that it was achieved by skeptical Enlightenment rationalists; and that tolerationist arguments generalize easily from religion to issues such as gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, providing a basis for identity politics.

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On May 10, 1776, the Second Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia adopted a Resolution which set in motion a round of constitution making in the colonies, several of which soon declared themselves sovereign states and severed all remaining ties to the British Crown. In forming these written constitutions, the delegates to the state conventions were forced to address the issue of church-state relations. Each colony had unique and differing traditions of church-state relations rooted in the colony’s peoples, their country of origin, and religion. This definitive volume, comprising twenty-one original essays by eminent historians and political scientists, is a comprehensive state-by-state account of disestablishment in the original thirteen states, as well as a look at similar events in the soon-to-be-admitted states of Vermont, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Also considered are disestablishment in Ohio (the first state admitted from the Northwest Territory), Louisiana and Missouri (the first states admitted from the Louisiana Purchase), and Florida (wrestled from Spain under U.S. pressure). The volume makes a unique scholarly contribution by recounting in detail the process of disestablishment in each of the colonies, as well as religion’s constitutional and legal place in the new states of the federal republic.

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.

Religious diversity and ferment characterize the period that gave rise to Romanticism in England. It is generally known that many individuals who contributed to the new literatures of the late eighteenth century came from Dissenting backgrounds, but we nonetheless often underestimate the full significance of nonconformist beliefs and practices during this period. Daniel White provides a clear and useful introduction to Dissenting communities, focusing on Anna Barbauld and her familial network of heterodox 'liberal' Dissenters whose religious, literary, educational, political, and economic activities shaped the public culture of early Romanticism in England. He goes on to analyze the roles of nonconformity within the lives and writings of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, offering a Dissenting genealogy of the Romantic movement.

When Baptists in 17th-century England wanted to talk about freedom, they unfailingly began by reading the Bible-and what they found in Scripture inspired their compelling (and, ultimately, successful) arguments for religious liberty. In an age of widespread anxiety, suspicion, and hostility, these early Baptists refused to worship God in keeping with the king's command. This book is about how these early English Baptists read the Bible together and were led by that reading to the startling faith convictions-startling, at least, in the context of 17th-century England-that eventually came to define them as a distinctive type of Christians. Author Lee Canipe believes that it's not only possible for Baptists in the 21st century to recover this habit of using Scripture to articulate their faith convictions about religious freedom, but that doing so is essential to preserving our unique Christian witness. With the boundaries between church and state as contested as ever, "Loyal Dissenters" offers scholars, clergy, and laypeople a fresh look at what Baptists believe-and how we can once again learn to talk about religious liberty in distinctively Christian language.