The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England

George Southcombe announces various intellectual debts in this volume. The book is structured around case studies: a method, as he reminds us, already employed by Christopher Hill in his Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (1984). The title sounds a distant echo of N. H. Keeble’s The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (1987), here qualified as “the best single volume on Restoration dissent” (p. 22), and Southcombe is largely inspired by the “religious turn in the historiography of the Restoration” of the 1990s (p. 3). Other “turns,” by comparison, seem to have been avoided. There are no female voices here, no consideration of the body, empowerment, or agency, and no emotional communities. Some would say this is refreshing, others that it narrows too much the experience of dissent to ministerial figures, albeit within a “minority” movement. Since these men used print as “one of the key...

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