Puritanism and Liberty Revisited
The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8957370 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Coffey (University College London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 961-985 |
| Publication date | 1998-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Historical Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-246X • E-ISSN: 1469-5103 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0018246x98008103 |
| OpenAlex | W2066918316 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 28 |
In recent years historians have grown sceptical about attempts to trace connections between puritanism and liberty. Puritans, we are told, sought a godly society, not a pluralistic one. The new emphasis has been salutary, but it obscures the fact that a minority of zealous Protestants argued forcefully for the toleration of heresy, blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even atheism. During the English revolution, a substantial number of Baptists, radical Independents, and Levellers insisted that the New Testament paradigm required the church to be a purely voluntary, non-coercive community in the midst of a pluralistic society governed by a ‘merely civil’ state. Although their position was not without its ambiguities, it constituted a startling break with the Constantinian assumptions of magisterial Protestantism
Anabaptists · Atheism · Blasphemy · Dissenting opinion · Heresy · Heterodoxy · Orthodoxy · Political science · Protestantism · Separation of church and state · Skepticism · Theology · Toleration · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies
The Godly and Their Neighbours
John Clarke and the Complications of Liberty
The battle for religious freedom during the English Revolution and the interregnum, c. 1647-1660
The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation, 1654–1676
Liberal Political Theory and the Cultural Migration of Ideas
Toleration and the Word in Revolutionary England
New presbyter meets old priests
Religion, Political Thought and the English Civil War
Neo-Feudalism’ in America? Conservatism in Relation to European Feudalism
Cultures of Coexistence in Early Modern England
The readmission of the Jews and the power of the civil magistrate
Taylor and Hobbes on toleration
From the “most fateful” to the “most fatal” social force? Conservatism and democracy reconsidered
The protestant ethic and the spirit of democracy
The Nurturing of Righteousness
The Merton Theorem Revisited and Restated
The Most Cherished Myth
Royalism Revisited
Matthew Tindal's Rights of the Christian Church (1706) and the Church–state Relationship
Protestantism and Authoritarianism
By the soil divided
Difference without Disagreement
Rethinking church and state during the English Interregnum
Weber e o advento do novo
Against Antiformalism
Religious Toleration and Ecclesiastical Independence in Revolutionary Britain, Bermuda and the Bahamas
On the Idea of a National Church
Contemporary conservatism and medievalism
| Unique citing works | 28 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,22 |
| Citation span | 2003 - 2025 (23) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 28 |