Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550-1800

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Introduction

   • Gary Schneider

   Pages 1-15

3. Protestant Identities

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 17-17

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   2. Scribal Networks and Sustainers in Protestant Martyrology

      • Mark Greengrass

      Pages 19-35

   3. Thomas Browne, the Quakers, and a Letter from a Judicious Friend

      • Reid Barbour

      Pages 37-48

   4. Writing Authority in the Interregnum: The Pastoral Letters of Richard Baxter

      • Alison Searle

      Pages 49-67

   5. Letters and Records of the Dissenting Congregations: David Crosley, Cripplegate and Baptist Church Life

      • Anne Dunan-Page

      Pages 69-87

4. Representations of British Catholicism

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 89-89

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   2. ‘For the Greater Glory’: Irish Jesuit Letters and the Irish Counter-Reformation, 1598–1626

      • David Finnegan

      Pages 91-106

   3. Negotiating Catholic Kingship for a Protestant People: ‘Private’ Letters, Royal Declarations and the Achievement of Religious Detente in the Jacobite Underground, 1702–1718

      • Daniel Szechi

      Pages 107-122

   4. ‘Every Time I Receive a Letter from You It Gives Me New Vigour’: The Correspondence of the Scalan Masters, 1762–1783

      • Clotilde Prunier

      Pages 123-135

5. Religion, Science and Philosophy

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 137-137

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   2. Utopian Intelligences: Scientific Correspondence and Christian Virtuosos

      • Claire Preston

      Pages 139-157

   3. Debating the Faith: Damaris Masham (1658–1708) and Religious Controversy

      • Sarah Hutton

      Pages 159-175

   4. Evangelical Calvinists Versus the Hutcheson Circle: Debating the Faith in Scotland, 1738–1739

      • James Moore

      Pages 177-193

   5. Questioning Church Doctrine in Private Correspondence in the Eighteenth Century: Jean Bouhier’s Doubts Concerning the Soul

      • Ann Thomson

      Pages 195-208

6. Back Matter

   Pages 209-215

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The first book to address the role of correspondence in the study of religion, Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550-1800 shows how letters shaped religious debate in early-modern and Enlightenment Britain, and discusses the materiality of the letters as well as questions of form and genre. Particular attention is paid to the contexts in which letters were composed, sent, read, distributed, and then destroyed, copied or printed, in periods of religious tolerance or persecution. The opening section, ‘Protestant identities’, examines the importance of letters in the shaping of British protestantism from the underground correspondence of Protestant martyrs in the reign of Mary I to dissident letters after the Act of Toleration. ‘Representations of British Catholicism’, explores the way English, Irish and Scottish Catholics, whether in exile or at home, defined their faith, established epistolary networks, and addressed political and religious allegiances in the face of adversity. The last part, ‘Religion, science and philosophy’, focuses on the religious content of correspondence between natural scientists and philosophers.​

• British Catholicism
• British Protestantism
• epistolary writing
• religious letters in early-modern Britain
• role of letters in religious communication
• role of letters in sustaining faith

• , Études Anglophones, Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I, Aix-en-Provence, France

  Anne Dunan-Page

• Ouest Nanterre-La Défen, Université Paris, Nanterre Cedex, France

  Clotilde Prunier

Anne DUNAN-PAGE is Professor of early-modern British studies at the Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I (France). A specialist in Restoration dissent, she has a particular interest in epistolarity, the relationship between religion and medicine, the early-modern Baptists, and she pursues comparative research on English and French Protestantism. She is the author of Grace Overwhelming: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind (Peter Lang, 2006), has edited The Religious Culture of the Huguenots, 1660-1750 (Ashgate, 2006), Les Huguenots dans les îles Britanniques de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Honoré Champion, 2008, with Marie-Christine Munoz), Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Ashgate, 2008, with Beth Lynch) and The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan (Cambridge University Press, 2010) She is currently co-editing the correspondence of Sir Thomas Browne, as well as some of his tracts, for the eight-volume Complete Works to be published by Oxford University Press. Clotilde PRUNIER is Professor in British history at the Université Paris-Ouest, Nanterre. She is the author of Anti-Catholic Strategies in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (‘Scottish Studies International 35’, Peter Lang, 2004), which focuses on the struggle between Presbyterians and Catholics in eighteenth-century Scotland, and in particular on how schools were used in the anti-Catholic crusade in the Highlands. She has published articles on eighteenth-century perceptions of the Highlands, on the role of education in eighteenth-century Scotland, and on Scottish Catholic correspondence. Her research has come to focus on the European correspondence of the clandestine Scottish Catholic community in the eighteenth century.

Policies and ethics