The World of Seventeenth-Century English Dissenters: Piety, Theology, Heterodoxy

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The six articles presented in this issue began life as papers delivered to the Eighth Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society, convened at Aix-Marseille University in July 2016. They form a companion volume to issue 22 of Bunyan Studies (2018), which focused on the reception of John Bunyan’s and George Herbert’s works. The articles gathered here reflect the questions placed at the heart of the conference. How were “dissenting voices”, either individual or communal, heard and projected in Britain and on the continent, and what dialogues took place between different denominations and confessions? “Dissenting voices” are here understood fairly broadly to be those emanating from the three major seventeenth-century Protestant denominations (Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian) whose ministers refused to conform to the 1662 Act of Uniformity, but they also encompass those emerging from a larger tradition that includes revolutionary sectarian movements, such as Diggers and Levellers, the subject of Laurent Curelly’s article below. Questions of naming and labelling various Protestants or Puritan groups or denominations assumed vital importance in the struggle over cultural representations. The period covered spans some fifty years, from the late 1640s to the mid-1690s, and each article reveals the vitality of seventeenth-century dissenting culture, and explores its relationships to a larger milieu.