Description
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III considers the Dissenting traditions of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the United States in the nineteenth century. It provides an overview of the historiography on Dissent while making the case for seeing Dissenters in different Anglophone connections as interconnected and conscious of their genealogical connections. The nineteenth century saw the creation of a vast Anglo-world in which Anglophone Dissent reached its apogee. Featuring contributions from a team of leading scholars, this collection presents Dissent as a political and constitutional identity, which was often only strong where a dominant Church of England existed to dissent against, but also as a cluster of distinctive attitudes to Scripture, spirituality, and culture which persisted even as they changed in different settings. The volume illustrates that in most parts of that Anglo-world the later nineteenth century was marked by a growing enthusiasm for the moral and educational activism of the state, which plays against the idea of Dissent as a static, purely negative identity.