Academic literature on the topic 'Nonconformist religion'

The article focuses on the role of religion among working-class inhabitants of two industrial towns in the Czech lands, Ostrava and Kladno, during the first half of twentieth century. It analyses the enormous conversion movement, the position of new actors of religious life, and the religious behavior of workers. Looking at the history of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the study understands religion as one of the constituent factors of society and its historic change. Traditional, new, and nonconformist religious actors appear as active agents in the private and public life of industrial towns. They mobilized workers, young people, and women, and they produced the major arena in which social, cultural, and church history come together.

ABSTRACTOn what religious and political grounds did restoration nonconformists argue for ‘ease to tender consciences’, and what did they mean by conscience? These questions are central to any evaluation of nonconformist political thought in the early restoration. Such dissenting thinkers as Slingsby Bethel, John Humfrey, Philip Nye, John Owen, William Penn, and Sir Charles Wolseley authored arguments for conscience during the intense debate about the restoration church settlement that occurred between 1667 and 1672. This essay outlines four different cases for conscience to which these arguments contributed. Two of these cases reconciled claims for conscience with the ecclesiastical authority of the monarch. Two other cases for conscience challenged the traditional religious authority of the crown.Should any or all of these arguments for conscience be considered radical arguments? The answer to this question requires a definition of the term ‘radical’ – one that is appropriate for the late Stuart period. The grounds upon which early restoration advocates of conscience accepted an indulgence under the royal prerogative in 1672 are also explained.The essay addresses the historiography of the restoration by considering Christopher Hill's and Richard Ashcraft's views about dissenting thought. It also proposes that the 1667–72 debate about the state and religion raised so many critical issues as to constitute an early restoration crisis about conscience.

In this article we unravel family religion as a crucial strand of evangelical piety in the late seventeenth century. We show how this programme was promoted in print and manuscript by a group of evangelical clergy from both sides of the conformist divide. Using the printed and manuscript memoirs of John Rastrick, a Lincolnshire clergyman, we explore the construction of clerical sociability through the printed text. In particular, we demonstrate that its heart was the communal reading of scripture and religious literature, confirming the household as the key locus for piety in this period. Whereas historians have traditionally been eager to categorize both clergy and laity in this period as either Anglican or nonconformist, we demonstrate that such a divide was often blurred in practice, in particular as represented through family religion. By focusing on issues such as sociability, the formation of identities, and reading practices, we also reconnect the second half of the century with its early Stuart past, suggesting that its influences and refractions fed into a continuity of evangelical identity, stretching from late sixteenth-century puritanism through the Civil War and Restoration to the onset of Evangelicalism in the eighteenth century. Though they were complex, these continuities help to show that a coherent style of evangelical piety was expressed across the ecclesiastical divide throughout the long seventeenth century.

Among the churches of nineteenth-century Britain, the Anglican Church held a unique, and somewhat embarrassing, position. It was, of course, the established Church of England—an arm of the state, assigned the honor and duty of serving as the focus and guide of the nation's spiritual life. Its position was embarrassing by the mid-nineteenth century because it obviously was not fulfilling its ostensible role. The increasingly secular nature of industrial society on the one hand, and the Christian challenge of Nonconformity on the other, cost the Church membership among all classes of people. That loss significantly undermined the Anglican claim that the established Church served the religious needs of the whole nation, and it led to persistent Nonconformist cries for disestablishment. Furthermore, Christianity's appeal to its traditional following, the poor and lowly, seemed to evaporate in the industrial environment of the Victorian city. Not only did typical urban workers not go to church (or chapel, for that matter), they were generally rather hostile to organized religion and particularly to the Anglican Church. In the Church of governors and employers, where services and sermons often could appeal only to the educated, workers felt, not unjustly, uncomfortable and unwelcome.There were several internal impediments to increasing the popularity (and thereby the social influence) of the Anglican Church, not the least of which was the dominant theology of early Victorian England. During what Boyd Hilton has called the “Age of Atonement” (roughly the first half of the nineteenth century), evangelical thought both shaped and justified the economic and social assumptions which underlay the policies of competitive capitalism.

English Puritans have only a small reputation for aesthetic contributions to architecture. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they worshiped God without making a show of buildings or beautiful ceremonies; consequently, there are few grand Puritan architectural monuments. Nonseparating Puritans, blending into the larger church, put their emphasis on the pure preaching and practice of biblical religion, not on outward appearances. And the Separatists, the strictest of the Puritans, gathered in disguised house-churches. Because of this artistic silence it is easy to downplay the importance of architectural concerns in the early history of Puritanism. Whenever historians mention “Puritan” architecture or “nonconformist” architecture, they are likely to describe it as simple, plain, functional, humble, austere, and practical. While true as far as it goes, this description is not the whole story. An examination of Puritan discussions about architecture in early seventeenth-century Netherlands reveals the interplay of theological and practical factors in creating the “proper” church architecture.

Despite the rampant popularity of space, alien and futuristic imagery in popular culture, little scholarship has recognised the impact of such themes on popular music. This article explores the complex relationship between the numerous uses of space, alien and techno futuristic themes in popular music and the construction of various marginalised identities. Arranged roughly chronologically from early 1950s rock and roll to late 1990s techno, I discuss how many artists, such as Bill Haley, David Bowie and George Clinton, have used such imagery to promote various nonconformist ideologies and identities ranging from African-American empowerment to Gay and Lesbian agendas. This article also relates developments in scientific space research and popular science fiction culture to corresponding uses of space and alien imagery in various forms of popular music. In general, popular music's use of futuristic space and alien themes denotes a related neo-Gnostic withdrawal and alienation from traditionally dominant cultural structures in an attempt to unite us with a common ‘other’ that transcends divisions of race, gender, sexual preference, religion or nationality.

Nonconformity was one of the major formative influences on Victorian society in Britain. The census of 1851 revealed that of seven million worshippers attending service on census day roughly half were counted in a nonconformist chapel. Even the Victorian who failed to attend service regularly found it difficult to evade the influence of nonconformity — and the Evangelicalism with which it was most closely —identified — in a society whose very customs, attitudes and even political life were so largely moulded by it. The main physical manifestation of this pervasive influence was the ubiquitious chapel, its most obvious human expression the professional minister. Of the leading nonconformist denominations the Congregationals were served by some 1,400 full-time men in 1847 while the Wesleyan, Primitive, New Connexion and Association Methodists had respectively 1,125, 518, 83 and 91 ministers in 1851.

The history of the Established Church from the 1740s to the 1830s is viewed as a period of inertia and complacency. Failure to respond to the exigencies of the economic and demographic revolutions resulted in the increasing weakness of the National Church when compared with extra-establishment religion. In the face of increasing pastoral responsibilities, the Church was slow to augment its existing accommodation, or to respond to the challenge of modifying the ancient parochial structure in the face of patron and incumbent interest, and increasing Nonconformist hostility. The resulting decline of the Church from its near monopoly position in 1800, to that of a minority Establishment by 1851, is well documented. Yet while the general pattern of Church extension is known, there have been few studies of the Anglican decline at the diocesan level. Of the twenty-seven dioceses in existence in 1800 one is of particular importance – the diocese of Durham, ‘where the Church was endowed with a splendour and a power unknown in monkish times and in Popish countries’. Here the Church possessed its greatest concentration of resources; here also it was to suffer its greatest reverses.

The revisionism which has marked the secularisation debate in recent decades has modified in various respects the traditional view that Christianity in Britain has been in almost constant decline for at least the last century or so. As a contribution to the debate, this article revisits the changes which developed in the internal dynamics of English and Welsh Nonconformity during the period from about 1850 to 1930. It argues that the secularisation of Nonconformity at the institutional level was primarily due to the fact that it became more associational and less communal in character. Indeed, Nonconformist Churches almost certainly contained the seeds of secularisation from their inception, as they were the first widespread voluntary associations in Britain with the concept of formal membership.

Rosa Ricci Summary of the PHD Dissertation: Religious Nonconformity and cultural Dynamics: The Case of the Dutch Collegiants There is ample reason to engage in research around the Collegiants, a minority religious movement in the Netherlands of the 17th century. An exploration of this topic can be interesting not only for a contribution to the history of Religion but also to understand the development of some central concept in the early modernity. Prominent, in this research, is the question that initially stirred my personal interest in the Collegiantism; i.e. to define and understand the religious and cultural background that represents the practical field of confrontation of Baruch Spinoza\'s philosophy. This historiographical question had the purpose of highlighting the relationship between Spinoza and the religious movements of his time in order to fully understand the public to whom he addressed his texts. Collegiants, however, constitute an interesting field of research not only for the study of Spinoza, but widely to understand the cultural and social dynamic of the Dutch Golden Age, a backdrop against which emerged a new idea of religion. This dissertation is not exploring a curiosity or an inconsistent exception in the history of the 17th century, but rather the centrality of a group that was influenced by and largely influenced its Dutch social, political and religious context. One of the major problems in capturing the significance of the Collegiants arises from the difficulty in defining this movement, which chose never to formulate a confession of faith and consciously refused to be classified within a specific Church, sect, or congregation. The name, Collegiants, was not the consequence of an active choice but a label that arose, together with that of Rijnsburgers, in the polemic pamphlets of the epoch. The difficulties to define such elusive religious group make, however, the Collegiants a fascinating field of research. In this dissertation the Collegaints are termed a “movement” in order to emphasize their explicit lacks of norms or model and to highlight the continual change and redefinition of their religious identity. This process can be properly defined using Deleuze\'s concept of becoming minorities: Les minorités et les majorités ne se distinguent pas par le nombre. Une minorité peut être plus nombreuse qu\'une majorité. Ce qui définit la majorité, c\'est un modèle auquel il faut être conforme [...] Tandis qu\'une minorité n\'a pas de modèle, c\'est un devenir, un processus [...] Quand une minorité se crée des modèles, c\'est parce qu\'elle veut devenir majoritaire, et c\'est sans doute inévitable pour sa survie ou son salut. This definition can help us to see both the positive and the productive side of the Collegiant movement, even thought it defined itself negatively in order to protest against the institutional Church and normative religion. The Collegiants were involved in this process of “devenir minoritaire” in a highly conscious way. They decided willfully to avoid strict affiliation to Churches or congregations and criticized explicitly the necessity of an identitarian definition. It can hardly be denied, indeed, that the religious reflection of the Collegiants was characterized by the conscientious refusal to construct a model or a norm to which they could refer. In this dissertation the term “minority” will therefore be used, always in reference to this concept, without drawing too much stress to the effective number of the Collegiants\' members. This question appear, indeed, misleading because it does not take into account the position that Collegiants\' member occupied in the economic, political and intellectual life of the United Provinces. It is the case of a group which, indeed, demonstrated in several occasions its deep influence in the Dutch religious life. Collegiants\' continuous efforts towards de-institutionalization and their aspiration to an egalitarian and democratic religious life have to be conceived as an invitation to their coeval confessions, to undertake the way of evolving minorities renouncing whichever exclusivity and authority. The articulation of the Collegiants\' proposal can be appreciated by studying the different lines of thought that emerged clearly from their texts. Most of Collegiants\' publications were polemical or written to answer specific accusations. Within the enormous number of sources that can be included in Collegiants\' works emerge a limited number of arguments. The question of religious organization, tolerance, freedom of speech and the epistemological approach in reading the Scriptures; these arguments can be taken as guidelines to understanding and defining the nature of the movement. These sources present arguments and concepts that we can take to be the Collegiants\' stance on religious life and belief. Some arguments, however, emerged with particularly force because of the sanction of the Church orthodoxy. Tolerance, free-prophecy and egalitarian and anti-authoritarian tendencies were sensitive points to which the Church or Congregations reacted with particularly vehemence, sensing a threat to their institutional power. The Chapter 5 of this dissertation are dedicated to the enumeration of these arguments. Each chapter presents a specific theoretical core and question. However the chapters are not self-conclusive because the various problematics encountered in the study of Collegiants overlap each other in continuous cross-reference and this gives rise to a kaleidoscopic effect. The concepts debated in this dissertation can be fully understood only in relation to each other, as they emerge to construct a semantic constellation useful to their contextualization. Each chapter, furthermore, comes to focus on one or more texts that are considered exemplary or representative of a particular tendency in the Collegiants´history. This methodology wants to underline how the constant redefinition of the Collegiants\' identity is always a matter of personal as well as collective choice, of internal debate and external polemic. An emphasis on the intentionality of Collegiants\' behaviour is particularly important in understanding which specific choice they made to contrast the authoritarian and exclusive vision of the religious life. These choices are well reflected in the use of a specific vocabulary and in the emergence of specific concepts that can be considered as key guideline to identifying some stable points in the shifting nature of the Collegiants. The first chapter of this dissertation delineates an initial general history of the movement together with the ground on which the Collegiants built their vision of belief: the question about Church organization. The chapter refers directly to the practical organization of the Collegiant movement, an egalitarian and anti-charismatic religious life which involved considerations of power and identity. This specific position, with its high level of nonexclusivity and anticharismatic consciousness, makes Collegiants movement an exception in the pluralist world of 17th century Holland and marked their difference to the constellation of Dutch reformation. Although some Collegiants\' demeanor mirrored the progressive individualization of cults and beliefs, they accorded central importance to the community, the context in which their religious ideal of confrontation and discussion was realized. The first attempt to write an exhaustive history of the rise and development of the Rijnsburgers was made by a Remonstrant preacher, Paschier de Fijne. He was the first opponent of the Collegiants; his book, Kort, waerachtigh, en getrouw Varhael van het eerste Begin en Opkomen van de Nieuwe Sekte der Propheten ofte Rynsburgers in het dorp Warmont anno 1619 en 1620 (Brief, truthful, and faithful history of the beginning and origin of the new sect of the Prophet of Rijnsburg in the village of Warmont), published anonymously in 1671 by his son, expresses his critical position vis à vis the Rijnsburgers. Besides representing the first opposition to the Collegiants, this work constitutes an important source because the author attended the first Collegiant\' assembly (the Rijnsburgers\' vergadering). In particular it describes the way in which this first meeting took place. For the first complete history of the Collegiant movement, however, we have to wait until 1775 when the Histoire der Rijnburgsche Vergadering (History of Rijnsburg\'s assembly), written by the Collegiant Elias van Nijmegen, appeared in Rotterdam. Both these sources are key instruments for reconstructing and understanding how Collegiants organized their assemblies, and how they achieved an acharismatic meeting, through debate and free-exegesis. These testimonies, which embrace a whole century, have, however, the demerit of representing the Collegiant\' vergadering (assembly) as an eccentric but defined ritual. What emerges, on the other hand, from Collegiants internal debate is that the conduct of the meeting supper, the organization of religious life, the definition of free-exegesis and the limitation of free speech were all subject to constant argument and discussion inside the movement. These concerns emerge in a fragmentary way in the manifold sources that discuss the nature of free-prophecy, tolerance and ecclesiology. In the polemic with Bredenburg, the Bredenburgse twisten, the debate about tolerance involved the discussion of women’s role in the vergadering and the reflections on free-prophecy indirectly interrogate the charismatic nature of the organization. Another important characteristic of the Collegiant\' movement, delineate in the first chapter, is the autonomous and independent development of the single collegia. City autonomy and the different religious and social contexts in which the Rijnsburger vergadering took root led to large-scale differentiation. The capacity of Collegiants to survive for more than a century with their refusal of normativity and authoritarian organization was substantially due to the penetration of the Collegiants\' arguments into the different confessions. This deep influence, in particular in the Mennonite and Remonstrant communities, defined the nature of the Collegiants, especially in some cities, as a stream inside institutionalized Churches. Because the collegia were open to all Christians, without limitation, even including Socinians and Catholics, most of the participants were also members of structured Churches, congregations or sects. In Amsterdam this phenomenon was particularly evident and the penetration of Collegiants\' argument in the Flemish community through Galenus Abrahamsz led to one of the most important schisms in the Mennonite history in the United Provinces. In other cities such as Leiden or Haarlem, the existence of cultural circles and other forms of nonreligious association constituted the basis for the spread of Collegiantism. It was only in Rijnsburg, the village in which the movement first emerged, that a common house was built, after 1640, to host the twice yearly Collegiant national vergadering. The practical organization of the Collegiants, as has been stated, represents the foundation on which noncharismatic ecclesiology and anticonfessional ideals were constructed. With the historical background of the first chapter it is then possible to discuss the main religious and political tendencies inside the movement. The second chapter of this dissertation, following the issue of religious organization discussed in the first chapter, deals with the principles of free-prophecy, Biblical exegesis, and Collegiants ecclesiology. The central concept examined in this chapter is nonconformity analysed in its historical development of England and the Netherlands. This chapter suggests that nonconformity as religious phenomenon was an elaboration and transformation of the anti-confessional and anti-clerical thought that emerged in the 16th century with the radical Reformation. The inception of nonconformity in the Netherlands is indicated by the transformation of the debate about Nicodemism, following Coornhert\'s defense of religious dissimulation and indifferentism. Nicodemism was indeed considered, in the early 16th century, as necessary behavior to avoid pointless martyrdom and persecution, utilized especially by the crypto-reformed in Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain. The diffusion of this conduct among Catholics in reformed countries but, principally, the diffusion and justification of Nicodemism in the United Provinces, where inquisitorial control and confessional repression presented a relative risk after the revolt against Spain, testify of the new meaning that this behaviour took on in the late 16th century. Nicodemism, as Coornhert\'s position shows, became the justification of anticonfessionalism as conscious behaviour, with the possibility of openly criticizing rituals and ceremonies as for achieving salvation. In this chapter particular attention is paid to the consciousness and the open dimension of this behavior. The neglect of dissimulation and the necessity of making public personal religious sentiments, is one of the basic elements in the change between Nicodemism and nonconformity. The nonconformists acquired the anticonfessional and anticlerical content of Nicodemism, but added a principal characteristic: the veridiction. The veridiction represents the necessity of telling the truth about personal belief and religious conscience, but also institutes the core of reality in the conformity between internal belief and external behavior. These elements were present in both English and Dutch nonconformity, which developed, however, into different and sometimes opposite ecclesiology. In the English case, external nonconformity to the dominant Church and the necessity of openly showing belief led to a demand for exclusivity and a process of individualization rooted in the juridical meaning of nonconformity. Despite the turning of the debate around the necessity of free-conscience, the understanding of nonconformity as a refusal of secular world and the attempt of Baxter to disconnect the debate around nonconformity to a juridical question, the English debate never developed into a criticism of the Church\'s organization or in the necessity of a democratization of the religious life, which was, on the contrary, dominant among the Collegiants. The central text in the history of Collegiantism and in the Dutch definition of nonconformity is Galenus Abrahamsz and David Spruyt\'s XIX Artikelen. This text was conceived, from the very beginning, as a collective discussion about the nature and the sense of a religious community in the absence of Holy Gifts. Collegiants give to the term nonconformity a specific meaning which designates the absence of conformity to the first apostolic Church and the end of the extraordinaries gifts of the Holy Spirit. This radical statement caused a reaction among the orthodox members of the Mennonites and Quakers, which see in the absence of Holy inspiration a complete secularization of the religious community. Nonconformity assumed therefore for the Collegiants a double meaning: on one side it was an elaboration of anticonfessional criticism through the statement of the absence of holy influence on the religious life, on another side it represented a deep criticism of priestly authority conceived as a secularized power acting as constraint of consciences. The absence of Holy Gifts was, for the Collegiants, the demonstration that no Church or Congregation could pretend to be the true or original one. The reaction of Dutch orthodoxy appears, indeed, completely justified, because Collegiants\' religious nonconformity presents itself not only as conscious antiauthoritarian criticism but also as a statement of the full secularization of the Church. Nonconformity was, for Abrahamsz and Spruyt, not only an unavoidable state, but also a necessary behavior to unmask the inauthentic religious life. This position represented the core of Collegiants\' practice, the reason for their continuous redefinition and, on the same level, for their refusal of any type of identification. The recognition of the secularized status of common religious life arose among the Collegiants accompanied by an ample debate about free-prophecy and Bible exegesis, stressing the possibility of an individual form of salvation. A central role, in this direction, was played by reflection on the veridiction as a form of conformity between the inward conscience and the external behavior. Although there emerged from the sources a controversial statement about how to approach and read the Scriptures, through the free-prophecy the Collegiants organized a form of collective exegesis that had its principal aim to avoid charismatic and authoritarian leadership but also to realize a form of community close to the first apostolic Church. The communitarian discussion also involved a debate on salvation, which had no more to be tied to the simple membership in a confession but developed as an articulated discussion on the significance of the ethical and religious life. A good Christian had to reinterpret and bring alive the first teaching of the Gospel, which can be summarized as love for others and in the propagation of tolerance as ethical and interpersonal behavior. Collegiants\' reflections on religious life, organization of communities, and their continuous effort to maintain equal relations in the absence of charismatic gifts in the Church institution, never turn to consideration of society or political forms. This absence was even more significant in a cultural and social context in which theological questions involved directly or indirectly political questions. In the same period, furthermore, Hobbes\' reflections on jusnaturalism challenge for the first time the divine legitimacy of political power, establishing the basis of a new vision of the political community. Collegiants understood religious community as deprived from any form of divine inspiration and conceived it as a human association, nevertheless they never outline a political parallelism to this situation. The most evident reason of this absence is probably the lack of a strong monarchy in the 17th century United Provinces. However the relationship between secular and religious ideology did not fail and was well summarized by the situation after the Synod of Dordrecht, which created a rupture in Dutch society with the consequent convergence of the religious position with the political one. The intervention of Grotius in favor of the Arminian party testified to a clear identification between theological opposition to predestination (which meant a challenge to Calvinist orthodoxy) and antimonarchical opinion. This fracture remained invisible in Collegiants sources that debated the secularization of Churches and consider religious congregations as human institutions, but never tried to define the legitimacy of political institutions. It is possible, however, to find in the history of the Collegiants one significant exception: Cornelius Plockhoy\'s attempt to promote a religious-social project in the Dutch colonies of Delaware . Plockhoy\'s work illuminates the relationship and the fruitful parallels that it is possible to make between the United Provinces and England, especially during the time of the Cromwellian Commonwealth. Plockhoy\'s most significant works were written, indeed, in England, some years before the fail of Cromwell, and testify to a particular social and political engagement in the construction and definition of a community with a religious basis. It is interesting to note that only after the English experience did Plockhoy returned to Holland, following the end of the Commonwealth, to propose a similar project to the city of Amsterdam. This chapter suggests an analysis of his English and Dutch sources, stressing the differences and the modifications to his proposal. The importance of this author lies in the possibility of deducing from his position a possible Collegiant\' thinking on politics and social organization. This contribution is certainly not descriptive of Collegiantism as a whole but represents the only explicit trace of the modification of Rijnsburger\'s religious reflections on the secular field. The description of Plockhoy\'s community in many respects echoes a certain irenicism sourced form the reading of Rosicrucian text; however it reflets and refers principally to his Collegiant experience . Although Plockhoy\'s account of the community project is never exclusively religious, the confessional element appears as prominently in both his Dutch and English projects. His religious and political project emerge clearly from his letters to Cromwell: it is essentially devoted to resolving the problem of religious conflict and the disturbance of social peace. It is, indeed, clear that Plockhoy\'s aim was not that of describing an ideal society or forming a separate community in order to conserve a purist religious ideal, but to propose a paradigmatic alternative to the religious turmoil and the social injustices of his time. The relation between political and religious arguments in Plockhoy\'s solution to religious turmoil highlights the interconnection between religious tolerance and colonial criticism, social injustice and authoritarianism. Plockhoy\'s meticulous pedagogic description of his project, his underlining of the necessity of economic independence for women and the possibility of them participating in collective work are expressions of an outlook that includes an aware judgment of his contemporary society. The last part of this chapter is dedicated to criticizes two approaches dominant in the literature about Plockhoy: one is the description of his project as a classical form of Utopia the other one is the reading of the Delaware religious community interpreted as a triumph of the work ethic. The third chapter of this dissertation deals with the tolerance, a fundamental and central concept to understand the nature of the Collegiants. It is our intention to show how during the 17th century there emerged in the Netherlands, in the religious context, a new concept of tolerance inspired by Castellio\'s works. The publication and translation, in the first half of the 17th century, of some of Castellio\'s work testify to the major interest that the French author had in the United Provinces, especially for the oppositors to the intolerant and orthodox Calvinist tradition. For the Collegiants, Castellio represented a predecessor in the struggle for religious peace. His work against the persecution of the heretics, supported by Biblical argumentation, represented a constant source of inspiration for the partisan of religious toleration. As suggested by Voogt , Castellio\'s deconstruction of the concept of heresy, as it was used by the Calvinist orthodoxy, in order to redefined it to signify a person who acts and believes differently from the mainstream, represented Collegiants\' basis to rethink the concepts of rationality and truth. The peculiarity of the Dutch concept of vedraagzaamheid (tolerance), in opposition to how tolerance was defined and discussed in the European mainstream debate, was certainly due to the elements of reciprocity and mutuality that this particular form of tolerance included. In the 17th century, tolerance (especially religious tolerance) was used to label negative behavior, to identify indifferentism or libertinism, intolerance was, on the contrary, a sign of unity, integrity, and orthodoxy. Furthermore, arguments for religious intolerance were justified by the biblical example of the Mosaic theocracy, while religious tolerance represented the interests of the emerging mercantile elite, which supported the Republican experiment and advocated cities\' autonomy. Tolerance became, in the 17th century, a concept contested because of its pejorative meaning; the progressive introduction of the pro-tolerance position, in order to contrast with this negative predominant vision, supported the idea that tolerance was not a menace to the integrity and peace of the Dutch Republic but the principal reason for its prosperity. The concept of tolerance became, afterwards, the battle-field on which the best juridical, economical and political form of the United Provinces was decided. The penetration of this debate about tolerance and intolerance in the Collegiants movement was adapted into an anticonfessional and irenic orientation focusing on religious and social peace. The defense of an unlimited and mutual tolerance represented, for the Collegiants, a proposal of pacification in the pluralistic dimension of the Dutch religious life, which was perceived, by their coeval, as a source of division and instability. The practice of nonexclusive tolerance and the extensive reception of different confessions inside the movement was a pragmatic attempt to find a solution to the problematic turbulence inside the Doopsgezinden and more generally to the religious disputations in the United Provinces. The central figure investigating the conduct and the limits of this debate inside the Collegiants was Jan Bredenburg. This chapter will, indeed, analyze the trouble arising from Bredenburg\'s position on tolerance and his extensive use of Spinozist concepts and language. This debate about the extension and the limits of tolerance involved, indirectly and directly, a discussion regarding religious organization, freedom of speech, and charismatic authority. In his works, Bredenburg, with his continuous redefinition of the discussion about tolerance, shows all the ambiguity and ambivalence of this term. Unlimited and mutual tolerance finds its limits in the continuous exigence of a normative delimitation of it, in the distinction of necessary and unnecessary dogma, but also, in a trivial way, in the impossibility of tolerating the intolerant. In the case of the Collegiants the adversaries of the unlimited and mutual tolerance undermined Collegiants\' nonexclusivism with their proposals to identify with a confession of faith. Pressures in the direction of identification and exclusivism were, however, only a part of the tolerance problem. With the “Bredenburgse Twisten” (Bredenburg controversy) the limits and the ambiguities of the concept of tolerance and the limits of the penetration of Spinoza\'s philosophy in Collegiant\' movement become clear. These limits concerned especially the necessity and priority of contrasting skeptical and atheist tendencies in the field of belief. The final chapter of this dissertation is dedicated to a question that underlines the problems of anticonfessionalism, tolerance, and secularization. The question asked in this conclusive part regards the possibility to trace the emergence of rational argument in Collegiants understanding of the divinity. To answer this question it was necessary to make some preliminary remarks about the diffusion and vernacularization of Descartes\' and Spinoza\'s philosophies in the 17th century Netherlands. Short descriptions of the two most influential systems of thought of the epoch are two methodological steps useful in understanding not only the degree of penetration of these philosophies into Collegiants but also the nature and meaning of the concept of rationality at that time. The definition of the relationship with the divinity, after the XIX Arikelen\'s statement of the unholy Church, is represented, in the history of the Collegiant movement, by a precise moment: the discussion and dispute between the Rijnsburgers and the Quaker missionaries in the United Provinces. The debate with the Quakers assumes a specific meaning not only because it shows the proximity and similarity between the two religious movements but also because it testifies to the emergence of a central concept: the light. Central text to determine the nature of this relationship and to define the meaning that for the Collegiants had the concept of light, is Balling´s Het licht op den Kandelaar (The Light on the Candlestick). Balling\'s answer to Quakers represents a penetration of Spinozist language into the definition of religion as knowledge of God but also a singular affinity and fascination for the Quakers\' concept of light. The question of contact with the divinity appears in the text as an individual experience, not mediated by any human instrument via language or the empirical experience. The approach to God is certainly described as an epistemological progression but the perfect comprehension of God is defined with the vocabulary of the affections rather than as full rational understanding. This text is certainly highly controversial and the continuous shift between philosophical and Quakers\' language make its interpretation problematic. Het licht op den Kandelaar reflects Collegiants\' position as a sum of philosophical argumentation, mysticism, and the irreconcilable reference to God as an infinite and unknowable creature. What emerges with force in the analysis of this source is the impossibility of understanding Balling\'s description of the relationship with God as purely rational. Balling, however, stresses the possibility of the constant perfectionism of human knowledge and self-emancipation and, furthermore, proposes new terms for religious thought. What he calls the “true religion” is described as ethical behavior constructed with the combination of tolerance, equal participation in the religious life, and the refusal to countenance formal conformism to Church institutions. Collegiants\' acceptance of a Church without God does not necessary involve a pure absence of divine work, on the contrary, the proximity to God is progressively researched in an interior sphere which involve a process of knowledge. The legitimacy of the “Truth” is, then, given no more by the transcendental gift of the divinity but in the accordance of personal conviction and ethical behavior, the religion is, indeed, redefined according to these terms. True religion is, for Balling, a continuous inquiry into the natural and internal principle that each individual possesses in order to achieve full comprehension of God\'s word. This statement testify not only of a new conception of the Religion but also reaffirm the minoritaire core of Collegiants´nature; religion, in their understanding, is not more matter of concord, unity, orthodoxy but source of knowledge, problematization and continuous questioning about its own identity. Nonconformity and cultural dynamics: some preliminary remarks Before starting the presentation of the Collegiants\' argument about tolerance, Church organization, and rationalism, to fully understand some choices and the approach of this dissertation, and to comprehend how Collegiants sources have been read, some methodological remarks are necessaries about the emergence and development of the historical phenomenon called nonconformity and how was it received and transformed in 17th century Holland. Nonconformity is, as will be shown, one of the central concepts developed by the Collegiants to justify their antiauthoritarianism and anticonfessionalism. The concept appears more interesting if we look at the number of meanings and social phenomena that it includes. It first developed in England in the juridical context and was named in the later 17th century as a defined religious movement that opposed the Act of Uniformity. In the English sources it is possible to retrace the history of this concept, demonstrating how the significance and arguments regarding nonconformity changed in one hundred years. Not far from England, in the United Provinces, the evolution of the concept of nonconformity follows another route, giving rise to radically different signification. Proposing a comparative study, between England and the United Provinces, of the development and semantic elaboration of the concept of nonconformity, is useful not only to understand the different expression of religious dissidence but also to detect cultural and social change in the approach to religion. Beyond the obvious differences between the two Countries, the different political, social and cultural history it is still possible and fruitful to compare how the concept of nonconformity developed in England and Netherlands because of the numerous contact between the Collegiants and the English religious dissident groups and because of the particular redefinition that the concept of nonconformity assumed in the United Provinces. The differentiation of English nonconformity (which dominates the European semantic field with direct and specific connotations of particular events with particular actors) from Dutch nonconformity, explains how historical agents using or interpreting a concept in a particular way can change its semantic connotation. The category of nonconformity, because of its shift from a juridical field to a social-religious one, indicates a semantic enrichment and a conceptual dynamic that can prove a sensible point to investigate structural changes. These case studies possess the necessary characteristics to be approached with the methodology developed by Koselleck and the Cambridge History of Ideas, because “society and language insofar belong among the meta-historical givens without which no narrative and no history are thinkable. For this reason, social historical and conceptual historical theories, hypotheses and methods are related to all merely possible regions of the science of history” . It is our intention to pay particular attention to the analysis of the sources and to their contextualization with the aim of constructing a map of nonconformity\'s semantic change via its arguments in pamphlets and polemical texts of the 17th century. It is our intention to investigate, through the study of the emergence of this concept, the tendencies of secularization, the development of arguments regarding religious indifferentism, and the renounciation of a religious life normalized by concrete institutions, rituals, and ceremonies. A semantic study of how the concept of nonconformity emerges, how it is filled with new meaning, and which new and old concepts intervene to define the religious and political field, is essential to explain and understand the Collegiants\' mentality in 17th century Holland, to determine how they think, and in which ways they influence the cultural and social dynamic in a specific context. The production of new meaning and the continuous nomination of a cognitive world influence, in their turn, the production and development of new instruments of thinking. To understand the shift, the dynamics, and the changes in the cultural field, a rhetorical and semantic analysis is necessary. The arena of investigation is, however, limited to the religious sphere and the sources analyzed are, in a large majority, polemical pamphlets, which means that the question about the correlation between the emergence of a new concept and change in the mentality refers principally to the change in the perception of religion as a dogmatic and doctrinaire system. The concept of nonconformity is surrounded by many other concepts, which partly explain its nature and constitute its semantic field. In this dissertation we focus on different concepts (tolerance, anticonfessionalism, Utopia, mysticism, and millenarianism) because nonconformity emerges, from the analysis of different pamphlets and sources, as correlated with them. Dutch nonconformity involves, for example, a necessary reflection on Church form, the organization of religious life, exclusivism vs. non-exclusivism and a certain vision of the future that actualizes itself as Utopia or millenarian impulse. This constellation of concepts, which characterizes itself for semantic differentiation but also for their strict interrelation, is also useful in explaining the nature of a radical and dissident movement like the Collegiants and in understanding how the religion, understood as belief experience, was fulfilled by new themes, concepts, and meanings. Furthermore, to investigate this conceptual connection and contextualize the emergence and use of determined religious vocabulary, it is useful to understand the nature and presence, in the Dutch religious field, of the phenomenon of secularization especially in its particularly form which goes under the name of “rationalization of the world”. The central question asked in this dissertation is, finally, not how it is possible to construct a category of nonconformity as an analytical concept that helps in understanding religious phenomena, but what is nonconformity and which kind of religious phenomenon it describes, how it has been used and with which consequences. The question regards how it is possible to detect structural change in the mentality while investigating conceptual change or emergence of a new concept. The cultural dynamic is, in this dissertation, understood as a semantic and cognitive phenomenon of mutual influence between emergence or nomination of new concepts and events historically determined. The History of Concepts approach privileges, as has been shown, the semantic field and text analysis for detecting changes in the mentality and in the social-cultural sphere. One more reason to find in this approach a fruitful method for understanding the Collegiants\' universe is the particular interest that they reserved for the language. The Collegiants stressed the importance of the spread of vernacular Dutch with the compilation of grammars, dictionaries, and lexica . In 1654 the Collegiant Luidewijk Meijer published the Nederlandsche Woorden-Schat, with a new edition in 1658. The Woorden-Schat was a Latin-Dutch and French-Dutch dictionary and a guide to principal terms in Nederduitsche (Low Dutch), with particular attention paid to the basterdtwoorden (Bastard Words) and the konstwoorden beghrijpt (cultural and artistic concepts). Some Collegiants in Rotterdam, as well as in Amsterdam, were active participants in a cultural project that worked on the definition and elaboration of the Dutch language in poesy, theater, and literature. Rafael Camphuysen and Johachim Oudaan were appreciated poets and, in 1669, Luidewijk Meijer and Johannes Bouwmeester founded a cultural academy with the name Nil Volentibus Arduum (Nothing is arduous for the willing). Around the same time Adriaan Koerbagh published Een Bloemhof (A flower garden), a theological dictionary edited according to controversial philological criteria, with the explicit aim of explaining the origin of superstition and unmasking the authority of theologians\' obscure and adulterated language . In 1706 William Sewel, a Flemish converted to Quakerism, wrote the Compendius Guide to the Low-Dutch Language, a Dutch grammar for English speakers. These sources and the presence in Collegiants\' texts of a continuous debate about the language, testify to great awareness in their choice of terms and words. Collegiants often use italics to emphasize special concepts, or to introduce a neologism or Latin calque. In addition, they refer several times to their efforts to introduce a correct and transparent use of the language. The Collegiants were surprisingly familiar with the crystallizing power in a certain employment of discourse and language; they explicitly challenged the predominance of scholastic and theologian’s terms, which substitute the direct and immediate experience of the religion with an intricate and abstract speculation on transcendence and divinity. Dutch grammar and dictionaries, work with the vernacular language in poetic or literary texts, and philological research on the origin of words, testify to a Collegiant Dutch language undertaking, an engagé project anything but neutral to democratize the discussion about religious matters and to guarantee egalitarian participation by both cultivated and uncultivated people. This effort is well represented by an emblematic figure in the Collegiants\' sources; the founder of this religious movement, Van de Kodde, is several times described as a cultivated peasant able to speak French, Latin, Greek, in the same way the Philosopherenden Boer (Philosophizing peasant), described by Stol in 1676, extols the superiority of a simple peasant\' reasonable pragmatism in comparison to the Cartesian\'s method and the Quaker\'s rhetoric. This was the essence of the Collegiants\' anticonfessionalism and antiauthoritarianism, a campain with both Utopian and rational implications, aiming at a possible rethinking of religious experience outside normative structures.

This chapter tracks the earliest Nonconformist Sunnyside to Quakers in 1706 in Crawshawbooth, Lancashire, and then follows as Quakers spread the name Sunnyside around the country from North to South. Quakers took the name to North America, where it is still in use as a church name. Different Nonconformist sects are described, and Sir John Betjeman’s fictitious depiction of Sandemanians and Swedenborgians is presented. The novelist Washington Irving’s highly-influential Sunnyside at Tarrytown in the state of New York is investigated, and it is posited that he named it after the farm named Sunnyside, Melrose, TD6 9BE, in the Scottish Borders, which has been so-named since at least the 1590s. Irving would have seen this farm as a young man when visiting Sir Walter Scott at his nearby house Abbotsford. An excursus discusses Sir James Murray’s Sunnysides, and his annoyance with Sir Walter Scott.

In British history, the period before the 1880s is sometimes known as the ‘high Victorian’ era – a time when the industrial revolution had blossomed into prosperity, when towns and cities built massive town halls and public buildings, when landmark reforms were taking place in parliamentary politics, when the British empire reached its zenith, and when confidence, innovation and dynamism abounded. It was also a period in which nonconformist and evangelical religion dominated the urban scene – across British towns and cities, philanthropic projects, Sunday School teaching, temperance and missions preoccupied thousands of middle-class citizens....

This chapter shows that literacy in English could be utilized by the Methodist community in Ireland to create a countervailing religious and political discourse to that of their English brethren, allowing them to intervene in both political and religious issues. This discussion of literacy, denominational identity, and Irish Methodism provides a vivid example of the deep connections between religion and literacy outlined earlier in the volume. With the emergence of the ‘nonconformist conscience’ into British public life in the 1880s, Irish Methodists responded by developing their own denominational newspaper that articulated a peculiarly Irish Methodist view, distinct from that being promoted in England. The establishment of the weekly Christian Advocate in Belfast in 1884 marked the transfer of denominational influence from the wealth of Dublin to the popular heartlands in Ulster. Thus the establishment and distribution of an indigenous Irish Methodist journal drew together a geographically dispersed denomination and developed a distinctly Irish Methodist response to current affairs.