George Southcombe 
The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England [PDF ebook] 
The Wonders of the Lord

The voices of non-conformity are brought to the fore in this new exploration of late seventeenth-century politics, religion and literature.


Whilst scholars have recently offered a much deeper and more persuasive account of the centrality of religious issues in shaping the political and cultural worlds of Restoration England, much of this has been broad-brush and the voices of individual established Church figures have been much more clearly heard than those of dissenters. This book offers a fresh and challenging new approach to the voices that the confessional state had no prospect of silencing. It provides case studies of a range of very different but highly articulate dissenters, focusing on their modes of political activism and on the varieties of dissenting response possible, and demonstrating the vitality and integrity of witnesses to a spectrum of post-revolutionary Protestantism. It also seeks, through an exploration of textual culture and poetic texts in particular, to illuminate both the ways in which nonconformists sought to engage with central authorities in Church and State, and the development of nonconformist identities in relation to each other.


GEORGE SOUTHCOMBE is Director of the Sarah Lawrence Programme, Wadham College, Oxford.

Table of Content

Introduction

Presbyterians, Poetry and Politics: Robert Wild: the ‘Scarlet Staine of Divinity’

Fluidity and Fixity: The Religious Identity of Thomas Grantham

‘Upheld by His Mighty Power’: John Whitehead and the Restoration Quakers

The Paradoxes of Dissent? Vavasor Powell and Benjamin Keach

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index