This book provides a critical and biographical account of the fascinating hand-made book of rector William Greswell (1848-1923), in which he assembled British and American reviews and accounts of the Romantic poet, critic, philosopher, and religious thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). J.C.C. Mays re-evaluates Coleridge’s nineteenth-century reputation through the lens provided by Greswell’s workbook. Mays demonstrates how Coleridge is one of the most complicated and influential religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, whose “religious musings” (most prominently as published in Aids to Reflection and On the Constitution of the Church and State, but also in posthumous collections such as Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit) cast a long shadow over religious thinking in nineteenth-century England and America. Although Greswell was but one of Coleridge’s many readers in the nineteenth century, his engagement with Coleridge’s writings was noteworthy for the sheer mass of the materials he assembled, and the breadth of the Coleridge he depicts. Greswell’s Coleridge is a Coleridge in whom all Coleridgeans will be interested.

This new study explores the role the Unitarians played in female emancipation. Many leading figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were Unitarian, or were heavily influenced by Unitarian ideas, including: Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Florence Nightingale. Ruth Watts examines how far they were successful in challenging the ideas and social conventions affecting women. In the process she reveals the complex relationship between religion, gender, class and education and her study will be essential reading for those studying the origins of the feminist movement, nineteenth-century gender history, religious history or the history of education.

A clothier and a deeply religious man, Joseph Ryder faithfully kept a diary from 1733 until his death, two and a half million words later, in 1768. Recently rediscovered and brilliantly interpreted by historian Matthew Kadane, Ryder's diary provides an illuminating, real-life perspective on the relationship between capitalism and Protestantism at a time when Britain was rapidly changing from a traditional to a modern society. It also provides fascinating insights on the early modern family, the birth of industrialization, the history of Puritanism, the origins of Unitarianism, melancholy, and the making of the British middle class.

A groundbreaking, revisionist account of the importance of the history of philosophy to intellectual change - scientific, philosophical and religious - in seventeenth-century England.

"With this volume the publication of A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain comes to its appointed end. The project of writing it was initiated by the Methodist Conference of 1953, and the lapse of time since then has made it possible to include at appropriate points the results of the continuing research into the origins and nature of Methodism; but 'the chance and changes of this mortal life', which are bound to impinge on the progress of so complex an enterprise, together with the heavy involvement of all the contributors in ecclesiastical, ecumenical and academic affairs, have made this period much longer than the General Editors would have wished." -- From the Preface

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.

Robert South (1634-1716) was one of the great Anglican writers and preachers of his age. A contemporary of Dryden and Locke, he faced the profound political and philosophical changes taking place at the beginning of the Enlightenment in England. Gerard Reedy's book makes a strong case for the importance of his sermons, their complexity, beauty and wit, and their place in the history of post-Restoration English literature. Discussing sermons of South that deal with his theory of politics, language, the sacrament and mystery, Reedy reintroduces us to a lively and seminal master of prose, politics and theology in the late Stuart era.