- The Oxford Handbook of The English Revolution
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland
- Post-Reformation Politics, or on Not Looking for the Long-Term Causes of the English Civil War
- The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644
- The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642
- The Irish Rising
- War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646
- Scottish Politics, 1644–1651
- The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649
- The Regicide
- Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658
- English Politics in the 1650s
- The Restoration in Britain and Ireland
- Oliver Cromwell
- Parliaments and Constitutions
- The Armies
- The Revolution in Print
- State and Society in the English Revolution
- Urban Citizens and England’s Civil Wars
- Crowds and Popular Politics in the English Revolution
- ‘Gender Trouble’: Women’s Agency and Gender Relations in the English Revolution
- State, Politics, and Society in Scotland, 1637–1660
- State, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1641–1662
- The Persistence of Royalism
- Varieties of Parliamentarianism
- Political Thought
- Religious Thought
- ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’: The Literature of Civil War, Revolution, and Restoration
- The Art and Architecture of War, Revolution, and Restoration
- The Long-Term Consequences of the English Revolution: Economic and Social Development
- The Long-Term Consequences of the English Revolution: State Formation, Political Culture, and Ideology
- Cultural Legacies: The English Revolution in Nineteenth-Century British and French Literature and Art
- The English Revolution in British and Irish Context
- Kingdom Divided: The British and Continental European Conflicts Compared
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter approaches the English Revolution as a theological crisis, a struggle over the identity of British Protestantism. During the mid-1640s, the Westminster Assembly laboured to reform the church and establish confessional orthodoxy, but despite producing a series of major documents, its presbyterian majority faced serious challenges from Erastians, Independents, and the growth of ‘sects and heresies’. While clergy like Richard Baxter, John Owen, Jeremy Taylor, and Richard Allestree produced works that soon acquired classic status, the Revolution also witnessed a spectacular proliferation of lay theology, ranging from high Reformed orthodoxy to the heterodox doctrinal systems of John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, and Thomas Hobbes. England became a marketplace of competing religious ideas, and religion exercised a powerful influence over political and scientific discourse. Although England’s ‘puritan Revolution’ ended in failure, the religious thought of this period was to prove seminal for later Calvinists, Anglicans, and Quakers.
Keywords: Reformed orthodoxy, Calvinism, puritanism, Westminster Assembly, heresy, Anglicans, Quakers
John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester. He has published widely on Puritan thought in the English Revolution, with books on Samuel Rutherford and John Goodwin, and essays on Richard Baxter, John Milton and Sir Henry Vane Jr. He is the author of Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689 (2000), and Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr (2013). He co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (2008), and is currently working with Neil Keeble, Tim Cooper and Thomas Charlton on a critical edition of Baxter’s memoir, Reliquiae Baxterianae, to be published in five volumes by Oxford University Press.
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- The Oxford Handbook of The English Revolution
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland
- Post-Reformation Politics, or on Not Looking for the Long-Term Causes of the English Civil War
- The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644
- The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642
- The Irish Rising
- War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646
- Scottish Politics, 1644–1651
- The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649
- The Regicide
- Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658
- English Politics in the 1650s
- The Restoration in Britain and Ireland
- Oliver Cromwell
- Parliaments and Constitutions
- The Armies
- The Revolution in Print
- State and Society in the English Revolution
- Urban Citizens and England’s Civil Wars
- Crowds and Popular Politics in the English Revolution
- ‘Gender Trouble’: Women’s Agency and Gender Relations in the English Revolution
- State, Politics, and Society in Scotland, 1637–1660
- State, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1641–1662
- The Persistence of Royalism
- Varieties of Parliamentarianism
- Political Thought
- Religious Thought
- ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’: The Literature of Civil War, Revolution, and Restoration
- The Art and Architecture of War, Revolution, and Restoration
- The Long-Term Consequences of the English Revolution: Economic and Social Development
- The Long-Term Consequences of the English Revolution: State Formation, Political Culture, and Ideology
- Cultural Legacies: The English Revolution in Nineteenth-Century British and French Literature and Art
- The English Revolution in British and Irish Context
- Kingdom Divided: The British and Continental European Conflicts Compared
- Index