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Interpreting Seventeenth-Century English Religion as Movements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

C. John Sommerville
C. John Sommerville
Affiliation:
C. John Sommerville is a professor of history at the University of Florida
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Extract

A number of historians have indicated, perhaps unconsciously, that the concept of religious movement would be useful in reference to seventeenth-century English religious history. But while some have used the term “movement” in describing some religious initiatives, no one has explored the implications of that concept for understanding either religious life or the England of that day. Rather, we continue to force things into the terms of “church” and “sect,” with apologies for a loose fit. And yet a disestablished Catholicism, as well as Puritanism, Quakerism, and an emerging ideological “Anglicanism,” are transformed when understood as movements.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , December 2000 , pp. 749 - 769
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2000

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