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

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