Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Dissenters, Religious – Italy – History »

AbstractIn a 1683 sermon, Benjamin Calamy, an Anglican priest, claimed that the separation of Dissenters from the Church of England was unjustifiable. Thomas Delaune, a London Baptist schoolmaster, responded in A Plea for the Non-Conformists (1684), which compared seventeenth-century Dissenters to sixteenth-century Reformers who had escaped from the “Church of Rome.” The Restoration authorities judged the book to be a seditious libel, for which Delaune was arrested, tried, and imprisoned in Newgate, where he was soon joined by his poverty-stricken wife and two children. By 1685, the whole family had perished in Newgate. This tragic story guaranteed Delaune's status as a martyr for generations of Nonconformists. Indeed, the Plea achieved amongst Dissenters the reputation of an “unanswerable” text. Its enduring appeal transcended denominational and geographical boundaries. This paper explores the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reception of the Plea, which Dissenters, both in England and America, repurposed for various politico-theological circumstances. Throughout the eighteenth century, Dissenters invoked the Plea against perceived cases of episcopal tyranny. By the pluralistic nineteenth century, however, this external, episcopal threat had largely been replaced with an internal one, prompting Dissenters to deploy the Plea against corruption and lethargy within their own denominations.

Conventional wisdom has long maintained that eighteenth-century religious dissent was a significant source of opposition to the Hanoverian status quo. For Trevelyan, for instance, dissenters were ‘vigilant champions of liberty and critics of government’. The high political visibility of rational dissenters in oppositional movements in the 1770s and 1780s – in opposition to the American war, the Test and Corporation Acts, slavery and the slave trade, the existing electoral system – has been particularly noted. However in recent years the political significance of religious dissent has been questioned. Roy Porter warns that the zeal for reform among dissenters should not be overestimated: ‘Not till the 1780s, and then only amongst a hothead minority, did Nonconformity show a potential for political radicalism.’ John Brewer has argued that the dissenting group associated with Hollis, Price, Priestley and ‘the small, snug, dissenting coterie of Newington Green’ marks one tradition of political opposition in the eighteenth century. But, largely confined to intellectual critique, remarkably uninvolved in the day-to-day cut-and-thrust of political action even evincing a patrician alarm at popular direct action, its contribution to political change was far less significant than the Wilkite movement.

This article examines changes in content and tone in some polemical exchanges between Anglican conformists and Nonconformists in the reign of Charles ii. In response to the Dissenters' pleas for comprehension and/or toleration because of shared Protestant beliefs, some conformists accused them of holding an antinomian doctrine of justification that undermined morality and political order – and Dissenters retorted with accusations of Socinianism. The disputes were complicated by divisions over justification within rather than between Anglican and Nonconformist groups, and by the late 1670s the perceived threats from papists brought renewed emphasis on common ground

Using the records of heresy trials as well as the vernacular texts composed by English dissenters during the period 1381–1521, this article chronicles the development of Wycliffite and Lollard views about sexuality and lay and clerical marriage. John Wyclif's Latin writings reveal that he both professed caution about clerical marriage and articulated a culturally traditional theology of sexuality. Whereas his hesitation at the prospect of a married clergy gave way to enthusiasm among later dissenters, his ideas about lay sexuality resonated with dissenting and mainstream writers alike. The evidence calls further into doubt the view that Lollardy was an innovative movement with respect to issues of gender and sexuality.

In the early eighteenth century, the legacy of conflict among English Protestants found an outlet in the controversy over ‘occasional conformity’. During the years 1702–4, Tory backbenchers in the House of Commons introduced a series of bills designed to strengthen the Corporation and Test Acts (1661, 1673), which had required all officials of local government and holders of Crown appointments to adhere to the established Church of England. Since the passage of these legal tests, Protestant Nonconformists seeking office had circumvented their intent by taking communion in an Anglican parish as seldom as once a year, while attending meetings of their fellow dissenters for worship. So long as they procured a certificate of conformity from the minister, they were eligible for government positions, and dissenters had gained control of several parliamentary boroughs.

David Hume's attacks on religion posed particular problems of method and approach for those who undertook to reply to them. This article is concerned with the responses of two main groups from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth: a number of Anglicans and Episcopalians, and a smaller group of rational Dissenters. The responses of some of these are well known, but those of others have not hitherto been investigated. The essay charts a definite shift from wit and ridicule to reasoned and mannerly response as the appropriate way to deal with infidelity. Most respondents assumed that Hume could be adequately refuted by rehearsing old arguments; however, a small but significant number maintained that his infidelity was of positive value for the future of Christianity.

AbstractIn the wake of Europe's religious wars, it became accepted that embassies could include chapels where forms of Christianity illegal in the host country could be practiced. In theory, only ambassadors and their entourage had the right to worship in such chapels, but in practice the latter became bases for full-fledged congregations of native religious dissenters. Constructed out of residential space, the chapels belonged to a broader category of edifice, the "clandestine church." They helped give birth to the modern doctrine of "extraterritoriality."

This article examines the legal treatment of religious dissent from a comparative perspective, by focusing on the legal evolution from intolerance to toleration, and from toleration to emancipation in France, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom. Historically, in Europe, only people professing the official religion were regarded as full members of the political community. Those who professed another religion were expelled, persecuted, discriminated or – in the best cases – merely tolerated. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in different degrees and forms according to the country concerned, European states started separating citizenship from religious belonging – a fundamental step in the process of secularisation of law in Europe. This development led to the emancipation of religious dissenters through the recognition of both the principle of equality of all citizens before the law, regardless of one's religion or belief, and the individual right to freedom of religion and belief.

This thesis explores the motivations behind the American and Foreign Christian Union’s missions to Italy during the American Civil War. The AFCU was a missionary organization founded in New York City in 1849 with the ambitious goal of ridding the world of Roman Catholicism. It was born during a time of nativist fervor when American Protestants saw Catholic immigrants as a threat to American democracy. The AFCU believed they could solve the problem of Catholic immigrants by converting the Catholic world to Protestantism, starting with Italy. The leaders of the AFCU believed the world was engaged in a struggle between Liberty and Tyranny. The war against the Confederacy and the fight to free Italians from the tyrannical Pope were different fronts of the same war. The AFCU entire unsuccessful as a missionary organization. They converted virtually no one. However, their publications were essential to helping American Protestants shape their identity.

Much has been written about the generation of Southern Irish Protestant intellectuals who played such a prominent role in Ireland's public life from the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell in the early 1890s until the rise of Eamon de Valera in the early 1930s. Very little indeed has been written about the generation of Southern Protestant intellectuals following them, those writers, journalists, academics and churchmen who were born around 1900 and who came of age in the decade following Irish Independence. Though few in number, these people represent an important facet of the young nation's cultural history and serve to refute the blanket assumption that the minority community had neither the will nor the ability to make a contribution to the new dispensation. As a particularly eloquent and stalwart member of this community, the Kilkenny man-of-letters Hubert Butler (1900-91) functions as the touchstone of this thesis, an individual worthy of attention in his own right but also compelling as a commentator on the challenges facing Southern Protestants generally during the period 1930-72. For in these years, Protestants confronted the delicate task of adapting to their changed position within Irish society without in the process forfeiting their distinct identity. As a nationalist eager to participate fully in the country's civic life but also as a Protestant fiercely committed to the rights of spiritual independence and intellectual dissent, Butler often struggled to balance the demands of community with those of autonomy. This thesis explores the various contexts in which he and his contemporaries challenged the normative terms of Irishness so that the criteria for belonging might better accommodate their minority values and experiences. In so doing, Southern Protestant intellectuals of this generation made a valuable contribution to the development of pluralistic values on the island.

This dissertation examines the cultural, intellectual and artistic contributions religious women made in the production of secular and religious books in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy. It presents the first comparative study of nuns' book production across Italy and introduces new manuscripts to the canon of nuns' bookwork. Though the scholarship of the last fifty years has increased our understanding of the institutional and individual lives of nuns, little research has been done on their production and exchange of texts. Nun-scribes and manuscript painters produced liturgical, devotional and administrative books for use in-house, as well as for secular and religious communities and individuals outside the walls of the convents. Evidence of their bookwork repositions them as active participants in a rich spiritual, intellectual and artistic life and broadens their sphere of activity and influence to include a wide community of secular and religious patrons, artistic collaborators, scholars, family members, and book-buying clientele. Through a close examination of the material evidence in their manuscripts, this study illustrates how nuns used the production and exchange of texts to further their individual and institutional goals. This dissertation makes an important contribution to the current understanding nuns' spiritual, artistic and intellectual life and practice and significantly reshapes the current understanding of women's education and learning in Renaissance and early modern Italy (1400-1650).

Religious dissent in Scotland in the years before 1550 is best categorised as evangelical: the two characteristics which mark dissenting activity are the doct[r]ine of justification by faith alone, and the reading of the Bible in the vernacular. Dissent can be found in the southwest from lay preacher Quintin Folkhyrde in 1410 to a small but identifiable group of Lollards in Ayrshire who were tried in 1494 for group Bible reading, eschewing rituals, and challenging the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. These 'Lollards of Kyle' were associated with the notary public Murdoch Nisbet, whose transcription of a Lollard New Testament into Scots was augmented in 1538 by the further transcription of textual aids from Miles Coverdale's edition. The Lollard group seems to have adopted the solafideism in this material, apart from their continued aversion to swearing. In the east, Luther's ideas were debated at St Andrews University in the 1520s, where Patrick Hamilton adhered to them and was burned in 1528; however, the same message of solafideist theology, Scripture reading, and perseverance in persecution was reiterated by his fellow-students John Gau and John Johnsone, in printed works which they sent home from exile. One of the primary concerns of ecclesiastical and state authorities was the availability of the New Testament in English, or other works reflecting Lutheran theology; they legislated against both owning and discussing such works. Sporadic heresy trials in the 1530s and 1540s reveal heretical belief and practice which is connected to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. In the late 1530s, a group of known evangelicals were at the court of James V: Captain John Borthwick tried to convince the king to follow the lead of Henry VIII and lay claim to church lands; Sir David Lindsay of the Mount probably wrote a play exhorting the king to enact reforms; Henry Balnaves was active after James's death in trying to forge a marriage treaty with England, which might have resulted in Henrician reforms. The governor Arran initially supported the court evangelicals, even backing a parliamentary Act allowing the reading, but not discussion, of the Bible in the vernacular. However, he reversed his policy and Balnaves, along with others, was imprisoned in Rouen, where he wrote a lengthy treatise about justification by faith alone, its effects on Christian society, and its help in times of persecution. George Wishart returned to his homeland in 1543, and began a preaching tour which took him from Angus to Kyle to East Lothian. Probably not having been guilty of the Radical beliefs laid to his charge in Bristol, Wishart held a developed Reformed theology, in addition to traditional evangelical concerns calling for a purified church guided by the Scripture principle, and drawing a sharp distinction between true and false churches. After Wishart was executed, John Knox proclaimed the Mass to be idolatrous before being imprisoned. The first Scot who appears to have moved from his basic evangelical beliefs to a functional Protestantism is Adam Wallace, a thorough sacramentarian who had baptised his own child. Upon his return in 1555, Knox took it upon him to convince the evangelicals that attendance at Mass was idolatrous, and he began administering Protestant communions. The central tenets of evangelical faith, however, continued to shape the incipient Protestant kirk.

xiv, 934 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
The dissertation focuses on Protestants in the Soviet Ukraine from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the USSR. It has two major aims. The first is to elucidate the evolution of Soviet policy toward Protestant denominations, using archival evidence that was not available to previous students of this subject. The second is to reconstruct the internal life of Protestant congregations as marginalized social groups. The dissertation is thus a case study both of religious persecution under state-sponsored atheism and of the efforts of individual believers and their communities to survive without compromising their religious principles. The opportunity to function legally came at a cost to Protestant communities in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR. In the 1940s-1980s, Protestant communities lived within a tight encirclement of numerous governmental restrictions designed to contain and, ultimately, reduce all manifestations of religiosity in the republic both quantitatively and qualitatively. The Soviet state specifically focused on interrupting the generational continuity of religious tradition by driving a wedge between believing parents and their children. Aware of these technologies of containment and their purpose, Protestants devised a variety of survival strategies that allowed them, when possible, to circumvent the stifling effects of containment and ensure the preservation and transmission of religious traditions to the next generation. The dissertation investigates how the Soviet government exploited the state institutions and ecclesiastic structures in its effort to transform communities of believers into malleable societies of timid and nominal Christians and how the diverse Protestant communities responded to this challenge. Faced with serious ethical choices--to collaborate with the government or resist its persistent interference in the internal affairs of their communities-- many Ukrainian Evangelicals joined the vocal opposition movement that contributed to an increased international pressure on the Soviet government and subsequent evolution of the Soviet policy from confrontation to co-existence with religion. The dissertation examines both theoretical and practical aspects of the Soviet secularization project and advances a number of arguments that help account for religion's survival in the Soviet Union during the 1940-1980s.
Committee in charge: Julie Hessler, Chairperson, History; R Alan Kimball, Member, History; Jack Maddex, Member, History; William Husband, Member, Not from U of O Caleb Southworth, Outside Member, Sociology

AbstractThis chapter discusses the role of lived religion in interpreting and forming the experience of illness, disability, and pain. The focus is on two cultural scripts that were inherent to early modern Italian culture: miracles and witchcraft. By using canonization process records and records of the Roman Inquisition as the source, the analysis focuses on the ways the veneration of saints and the belief in miraculous healing as well as the idea that witchcraft could make a person ill played into the lived religion of the period.

By the later middle ages wax had become an indispensable element in Christian religious observance, used throughout churches, liturgical services and lifecycle events. Wax was therefore both essential and ubiquitous. It was also valuable and easily re-cycled. This paper analyses the use, reuse and barter of wax in circular economies within cathedrals, monasteries and professional guilds in England and Italy. It further considers how the circulation of wax within and outside these institutions could act as a mechanism to cut expenses and potentially increase profits or provide opportunities for religious participation among even the very poor.

AbstractIn general, historians of science and historians of ideas do not focus on critical appraisals of scientific ideas such as vitalism and materialism from Catholic intellectuals in eastern and southeastern Europe, nor is there much comparative work available on how significant European ideas in the life sciences such as materialism and vitalism were understood and received outside of France, Germany, Italy and the UK. Insofar as such treatments are available, they focus on the contributions of nineteenth century vitalism and materialism to later twentieth ideologies, as well as trace the interactions of vitalism and various intersections with the development of genetics and evolutionary biology see Mosse (The culture of Western Europe: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Westview Press, Boulder, 1988, Toward the final solution: a history of European racism. Howard Fertig Publisher, New York, 1978; Turda et al., Crafting humans: from genesis to eugenics and beyond. V&R Unipress, Goettingen, 2013). English and American eugenicists (such as William Caleb Saleeby), and scores of others underscored the importance of vitalism to the future science of “eugenics” (Saleeby, The progress of eugenics. Cassell, New York, 1914). Little has been written on materialism qua materialism or vitalism qua vitalism in eastern Europe.The Czech and Slovene cases are interesting for comparison insofar as both had national awakenings in the middle of the nineteenth century which were linguistic and scientific, while also being religious in nature (on the Czech case see David, Realism, tolerance, and liberalism in the Czech National awakening: legacies of the Bohemian reformation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2010; on the Slovene case see Kann and David, Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918. University of Washington Press, Washington, 2010). In the case of many Catholic writers writing in Moravia, there are not only slight noticeable differences in word-choice and construction but a greater influence of scholastic Latin, all the more so in the works of nineteenth century Czech priests and bishops.In this case, German, Latin and literary Czech coexisted in the same texts. Thus, the presence of these three languages throws caution on the work on the work of Michael Gordin, who argues that scientific language went from Latin to German to vernacular. In Czech, Slovenian and Croatian cases, all three coexisted quite happily until the First World War, with the decades from the 1840s to the 1880s being particularly suited to linguistic flexibility, where oftentimes writers would put in parentheses a Latin or German word to make the meaning clear to the audience. Note however that these multiple paraphrases were often polemical in the case of discussions of materialism and vitalism.In Slovenia Čas (Time or The Times) ran from 1907 to 1942, running under the muscular editorship of Fr. Aleš Ušeničnik (1868–1952) devoted hundreds of pages often penned by Ušeničnik himself or his close collaborators to wide-ranging discussions of vitalism, materialism and its implied social and societal consequences. Like their Czech counterparts Fr. Matěj Procházka (1811–1889) and Fr. Antonín LenzMaterialismMechanismDynamism (1829–1901), materialism was often conjoined with "pantheism" and immorality. In both the Czech and the Slovene cases, materialism was viewed as a deep theological problem, as it made the Catholic account of the transformation of the Eucharistic sacrifice into the real presence untenable. In the Czech case, materialism was often conjoined with “bestiality” (bestialnost) and radical politics, especially agrarianism, while in the case of Ušeničnik and Slovene writers, materialism was conjoined with “parliamentarianism” and “democracy.” There is too an unexamined dialogue on vitalism, materialism and pan-Slavism which needs to be explored.Writing in 1914 in a review of O bistvu življenja (Concerning the essence of life) by the controversial Croatian biologist Boris Zarnik) Ušeničnik underscored that vitalism was an speculative outlook because it left the field of positive science and entered the speculative realm of philosophy. Ušeničnik writes that it was “Too bad” that Zarnik “tackles” the question of vitalism, as his zoological opinions are interesting but his philosophy was not “successful”. Ušeničnik concluded that vitalism was a rather old idea, which belonged more to the realm of philosophy and Thomistic theology then biology. It nonetheless seemed to provide a solution for the particular characteristics of life, especially its individuality. It was certainly preferable to all the dangers that materialism presented. Likewise in the Czech case, Emmanuel Radl (1873–1942) spent much of his life extolling the virtues of vitalism, up until his death in home confinement during the Nazi Protectorate. Vitalism too became bound up in the late nineteenth century rediscovery of early modern philosophy, which became an essential part of the development of new scientific consciousness and linguistic awareness right before the First World War in the Czech lands. Thus, by comparing the reception of these ideas together in two countries separated by ‘nationality’ but bounded by religion and active engagement with French and German ideas (especially Driesch), we can reconstruct not only receptions of vitalism and materialism, but articulate their political and theological valances.

AbstractMost of Eriksen’s research over the years has somehow or other dealt with the local implications of globalization. He has looked at ethnic dynamics, the challenges of forging national identities, creolization and cosmopolitanism, the legacies of plantation societies and, more recently, climate change in the era of ‘accelerated acceleration’. Here we want to talk not just about cultural diversity and not just look at biological diversity, but both, because he believes that there are some important pattern resemblances between biological and cultural diversity. And many of the same forces militate against that and threaten to create a flattened world with less diversity, less difference. And, obviously, there is a concern for the future. We need to have an open ended future with different options, maximum flexibility and the current situation with more homogenization. We live in a time when there are important events taking place, too, from climate change to environmental destruction, and we need to do something about that. In order to show options and possibilities for the future, we have to focus on diversity because complex problems need diverse answers.Martina: I would like to start with a passion of mine to get into one of your main research themes: diversity. I’m a Marvel fan and, what is emerging, is a reduction of what Marvel has always been about: diversity in comics. There seems to be a standardization that reduces the specificity of each superhero and so it seems that everyone is the same in a kind of indifference of difference. So in this hyper-diversity, I think there is also a reduction of diversity. Do you see something similar in your studies as well?Thomas: It’s a great example, and it could be useful to look briefly at the history of thought about diversity and the way in which it’s suddenly come onto the agenda in a huge way. If you take a look at the number of journal articles about diversity and related concepts, the result is stunning. Before 1990, the concept was not much used. In the last 30 years or so, it’s positively exploded. You now find massive research on biodiversity, cultural diversity, agro-biodiversity, biocultural diversity, indigenous diversity and so on. You’ll also notice that the growth curve has this ‘overheating shape’ indicating exponential growth in the use of the terms. And why is this? Well, I think this has something to do with what Hegel described when he said that ‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk,’ which is to say that it is only when a phenomenon is being threatened or even gone that it catches widespread attention. Regarding diversity, we may be witnessing this mechanism. The extreme interest in diversity talk since around 1990 is largely a result of its loss which became increasingly noticeable since the beginning of the overheating years in the early 1990s. So many things happened at the same time, more or less. I was just reminded yesterday of the fact that Nelson Mandela was released almost exactly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were many major events taking place, seemingly independently of each other, in different parts of the world. This has something to do with what you’re talking about, because yes, I think you’re right, there has been a reduction of many kinds of diversity.So when we speak of superdiversity, which we do sometimes in migration studies (Vertovec, 2023), we’re really mainly talking about people who are diverse in the same ways, or rather people who are diverse in compatible ways. They all fit into the template of modernity. So the big paradox here of identity politics is that it expresses similarity more than difference. It’s not really about cultural difference because they rely on a shared language for talking about cultural difference. So in other words, in order to show how different you are from everybody else, you first have to become quite similar. Otherwise, there is a real risk that we’d end up like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lion. In Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1983), he remarks that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand what it was saying. Lévi-Strauss actually says something similar in Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1976) where he describes meeting an Amazonian people, I think it was the Nambikwara, who are so close that he could touch them, and yet it is as though there were a glass wall between them. That’s real diversity. It’s different in a way that makes translation difficult. And it’s another world. It’s a different ontology.These days, I’m reading a book by Leslie Bank and Nellie Sharpley about the Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa (Bank & Sharpley, 2022), and there are rural communities in the Eastern Cape which don’t trust biomedicine, so many refuse vaccinations. They resist it. They don’t trust it. Perhaps they trust traditional remedies slightly more. This was and is the situation with HIV-AIDS as well. This is a kind of diversity which is understandable and translateable, yet fundamental. You know, there are really different ways in which we see the Cosmos and the universe. So if you take the Marvel films, they’ve really sort of renovated and renewed the superhero phenomenon, which was almost dead when they began to revive it. As a kid around 1970, I was an avid reader of Superman and Batman. I also read a lot of Donald Duck and incidentally, a passion for i paperi and the Donald/Paperino universe is one curious commonality between Italy and Norway. Anyway, with the superheroes, everybody was very white. They represented a the white, conservative version of America. In the renewed Marvel universe, there are lots of literally very strong women, who are independent agents and not just pretty appendages to the men as they had often been in the past. You also had people with different cultural and racial identities. The Black Panther of Wakanda and all the mythology which went with it are very popular in many African countries. It’s huge in Nigeria, for example, and seems to add to the existing diversity. But then again, as we were saying and as you observed, these characters are diverse in comparable within a uniform framework, a pretty rigid cultural grammar which presupposes individualism: there are no very deep cultural differences in the way they see the world. So that’s the new kind of diversity, which really consists more of talking about diversity than being diverse. I should add that the superdiversity perspective is very useful, and I have often drawn on it myself in research on cultural complexity. But it remains framed within the language of modernity.Martina: What you just said makes me think of contradictory dimensions that are, however, held together by the same gaze. How is it that your approach helps hold together processes that nevertheless tell us the same thing about the concept of diversity?Thomas: When we talk about diversity, it may be fruitful to look at it from a different angle. We could look at traditional knowledge and bodily skills among indigenous peoples, for example, and ideas about nature and the afterlife. Typically, some would immediately object that this is wrong and we are right and they should learn science and should go to school, period. But that’s not the point when we approach them as scholars, because then we try to understand their worlds from within and you realize that this world is experienced and perceived in ways which are quite different from ours. One of the big debates in anthropology for a number of years now has concerned the relationship between culture and nature after Lévi-Strauss, the greatest anthropological theorist of the last century. His view was that all cultures have a clear distinction between culture and nature, which is allegedly a universal way of creating order. This view has been challenged by people who have done serious ethnographic work on the issue, from my Oslo colleague Signe Howell’s work in Malaysia to studies in Melanesia, but perhaps mainly in the Amazon, where anthropologists argue that there are many ways of conceptualising the relationship between humans and everything else. Many of these world-views are quite ecological in character. They see us as participants in the same universe as other animals, plants and even rocks and rivers, and might point out that ‘the land does not belong to us – we belong to the land’. That makes for a very different relationship to nature than the predatory, exploitative form typical of capitalist modernity. In other words, in these cultural worlds, there is no clear boundary between us humans and non-humans. If you go in that direction, you will discover that in fact, cultural diversity is about much more than giving rights to minorities and celebrating National Day in different ethnic costumes, or even establishing religious tolerance. That way of talking about diversity is useful, but it should not detract attention from deeper and older forms of diversity.

Abstract With these words Joseph Priestley, English chemist, Unitarian minister, political philosopher. public intellectual, and educator reemphasized an intellectual attitude that had become fundamental for Rational Dissenters and by extension. their academies of collegiate education.3 Arguably the foremost promoters of Enlightenment ideals of rationalism and religious tolerance in eighteenth-century England, Rational Dissenters had done much to encourage reform in higher education.

To understand Dissent, one must understand the role of the Bible in Protestant religious culture and theology. This chapter begins by depicting a biblical age, one marked by intensive biblical scholarship and mass circulation of the vernacular Bible. It then considers the biblically grounded theologies of the Dissenters, and their relation to the wider Reformed tradition. It argues that doctrinal disputes often cut across ecclesiastical lines. Although most Dissenters were wedded to Reformed orthodoxy, radical Dissenters presented powerful challenges to Reformed teaching on Scripture, the Trinity, predestination, and the moral law. Finally, the chapter turns to the shared quest for a biblical ecclesiology. While the practice of biblical study exercised a centripetal force, pulling Protestants together around their sacred text, it also had a centrifugal effect, throwing them outwards into rival factions. Dissenters would accuse each other, not just conformists, of being insufficiently biblical. Scripture provided them with a common reference point, a common language, and thus a powerful sense of affinity. Yet at the same time, Scripture was a textual battleground.

The Irish history of religious nonconformity, dissent, and toleration is distinctive. Protestant nonconformity and dissent in early modern Ireland was both energized and enervated by its relationships to the Established Church, the majority Catholic population, and the changing political environments of the neighbouring island and the religious loyalties of its governments and royal families. In securing the rights of the Church by law established, bishops were unable to prohibit the worship of the most important groups of Protestant nonconformists, who seemed continually to grow in numbers, wealth, and influence. The English Toleration Act (1689) made little difference to the circumstances of Irish Protestant Dissenters, and although they benefited from James’s Declaration of Indulgence (1687) and the granting of limited rights for Dissenters under the Irish Toleration Act (1719), their access to the opportunities of public service was only guaranteed with the removal of the sacramental test in 1780.