A fruit of the Dissenting Experience project (http://dissent.hypotheses.org), the essays in this useful volume collectively treat the “experience” of seventeenth-century English Dissent with an eye to both socio-political context and the dynamic involvement of “the unknown Dissenters”—those men and women who populated the multiplying Baptist, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches after 1640 (10). The authors examine this experience not through the narrow lens of the lives of certain key actors (traditionally, pastors), but rather through an investigation of the intersecting themes of personal responsibility, communal participation, and internecine tension that inhered in “gathered church life” amid the tumult of seventeenth-century England (6). A common thread that runs through these contributions is the various shades of “enquiry” that Dissenting pastors and church members “faced, posed, debated, and pursued when shaping, negotiating, and delivering a church life defined by” scriptural fidelity and contrasted with “their ecclesial rivals” (7).
Joel Halcomb's essay on Congregational church order opens this volume with a study of the “politics” of church life in Congregational churches in the 1640s and 1650s, employing a little-used archival cache, “church books,” to shift scholarly attention from Christopher Hill's concern “with personalities and with radical ideas and experiences” in the period, to the “more mundane strictures and structures of ‘church life’” (27). Chapters two through five, by Elliot Vernon, Kathleen Lynch, Chad Van Dixhoorn, and Polly Ha, respectively, are where this volume really finds its legs. Broadly, these essays investigate the formation and perpetuation of Dissenting “church life” in the unstable religio-political climate of the mid-century, before the Restoration. As an appropriate coda to this section, and a thematic precis for the volume, Ha's look at the shape and limits of “freedom of association” during an especially volatile span of social, religious, and political instability captures well the significance of the subject of English Dissent for the field of early modern English history (102).
Specialists, graduate students, and precocious undergraduates are well-served by this needed engagement with the complicated factors that comprised and informed the “experience” of Dissent in seventeenth-century England.
