Religious Truth and Authority in an Age of Division

Week 2

Tutor: Naomi Pullin

This seminar will examine the different contexts that surrounded ideas about religious truth, as it emerged in the decades and centuries after the European Reformations. This was a time of significant upheaval and intolerance with many groups who dissented from the Church of England persecuted for their beliefs. The seminar will explore dilemmas of conscience that shaped the religious and political landscape of early modern Britain in three contexts: outward conformity to church and state and the phenomenon of 'nicodemism'; the radical sectarian groups in the late-seventeenth century; and atheism and doubt in the existence of God. Case studies and primary sources will focus on groups like the Quakers, Diggers and Ranters who took ideas of religious conscience and truth to the extreme and were heavily persecuted as a result.

Required preparation

• Read Keith Thomas, 'Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England', in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England (1993), 29-56.
• Read William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience: Wherein is set downe the nature, properties, and differences thereof: as also the way to Get and keepe good Conscience.(1596) Cap. I, 'Of Conscience', pp. 1-6.
• Choose one of the three seminar areas related and identify at least one secondary source from the 'Key texts' section AND at least one primary source of interest to you. Be prepared to share your findings with the rest of the group:
  • Dissimulation, nicodemism and outward conformity
  • Coexistence, pluralism and the problem of toleration following the Civil Wars
  • Atheism, unbelief and doubt.

Seminar questions

• What role did conscience play in ideas about religious truth?
• In what circumstances was it permissible to lie?
• What dilemmas of conscience did early modern dissenting minorities experience?
• Why were the practices of equivocation and nicodemism so controversial?
• What was casuistry and why was it important in the seventeenth century?
• How far and in what ways did Europe's reformations create a crisis of atheism and unbelief?

Key texts

• Justin Champion, ''Willing to suffer': Law and Religious Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England', in John McLaren and Harold G. Coward (eds), Religious Conscience, The State, and the Law: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Significance (1999), 13-28.
• M. Hunter ‘The Problem of 'Atheism' in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1985).
• Brooke Sylvia Palmieri, ‘Truth and Suffering in the Quaker Archives’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 212 (2018) 239-262
• Laura A. M. Stewart, ‘Contesting Reformation: Truth-Telling, the Female Voice, and the Gendering of Political Polemic in Early Modern Scotland’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 84.4 (2021) 717-743.
• Johann P. Sommerville, 'The 'New Art of Lying': Equivocation, Mental Reservation, and Casuistry', in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (2009), 159-184.
• Keith Thomas, 'Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England', in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds) Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England (1993), 29-56.
• Edward Vallance, ‘Oaths, Casuistry and Equivocation: Anglican Responses to the Engagement Controversy’, Historical Journal 44 (2001), 59-77.
• Alexandra Walsham, ‘England’s Nicodemites: Crypto-Catholicism and Religious Pluralism in the Post-Reformation Context’, in K. Cameron et al (eds),The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France(2000).
• P. Zagorin, ‘The Historical Significance of Lying and Dissimulation’, Social Research, 63 (1996)

Primary sources

• Laurence Clarkson, Truth released from prison, to its former libertie (2nd edn., 1646).
• Thomas Ellwood, Truth Prevailing (1676),Preface and part of Chapter 6 'Of Swearing', pp. 100-120. [part of a bigger debate with others, including Thomas Comber and former Quaker George Keith, Ellwood published a further text called 'Truth defended'].
• William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience: Wherein is set downe the nature, properties, and differences thereof: as also the way to Get and keepe good Conscience. (1596) Cap. I, 'Of Conscience', pp. 1-6.
• William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Case of Conscience (1606), 'Chap II. I. Question. Whether there be a God?', and 'Chap. XIII, I. Question. What is an Oath?', and 'Sect. 3. III Question. How farre-forth doth an Oath Binde, and is to be kept?', pp. 202-4, 379-84, 390-96.
• John Downame, A Treatise against Lying (1636), excerpts from Chapters I and XVI, pp. 7–11, 164–5.
• Henry Garnet, ‘Treatise of Equivocation’ (c. 1598), in Ginevra Crosignani, Thomas M. McCoog, and Michael Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England (2010), pp. 321-35.
• P. J. Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, Catholic Record Society 67 (1981).
• Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheisme, Or, An Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Minde of Man (1653), 'The Preface', [unnumbered images 5-17].
• Norman Penney (ed.), ‘The First Publishers of Truth': Being Early Records … of the Introduction of Quakerism into the Counties of England and Wales (1907).
• Gerard Winstanley, An Appeale to all Englishmen, to judge between Bondage and Freedome, sent from those that began to digge upon George Hill in Surrey (1650).

Further reading

Dissimulation and the problem of nicodemism after Europe's Reformations

• Bernard Capp, 'The Religious Marketplace: Public Disputations in Civil War and Interregnum England', English Historical Review 129, issue 536 (2014), 47-78.
• Patrick Collinson, The Puritan Character. Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth Century English Culture (1989).
• Patrick Collinson, 'Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs', in A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (eds), Clio's Mirror (1985).
• Patrick Collinson, 'The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful', in O. P Grell et al (eds), From Persecution to Toleration (1991).
• B. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (1999).
• Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (2007), esp. ch. 7.
• Andrew Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, in his Marian Protestantism (1996)
• Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists (1993), chs 2-4.
• Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500-1700(2006).
• P. Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe(London and Cambridge, Mass., 1990), chs. 7–9.

Conscience, casuistry and oath-taking

• J. C. Davis, ‘A short course of discourse: studies in early modern conscience, duty and the English protestant interest’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1995).
• Andrew Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance (2021).
• Christopher Hill, ‘From Oaths to Interest’ (chapter xi of Society and Puritanism 1964).
• D M Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in C17th England: The Significance of Oaths and Engagements(1999).
• A.Jonsen and S.Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry (1988).
• Gary De Krey ‘Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting cases for Conscience 1667-1672’, Historical Journal (1995).
• Edmund Leites, Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (2009), esp. 'Casuistry and Character'.
• John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England (1993).
• Barret Reiter, 'A "Fiction of the Mind": Imagination and Idolatry in Early Modern England', Past & Present, vol. 57, supplement 16 (2022), 201-230.
• E. Rose, Cases of Conscience: Alternatives Open to Recusants and Puritans Under Elizabeth I and James I (1975).
• John Spurr, ‘Perjury, Profanity and Politics’, The Seventeenth Century, vol. 8, no 1. (1993), 29-50.
• Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism and the Political nation 1553-1682 (2005).
• J. Wright, ‘Surviving the English Reformation: Commonsense, Conscience and Circumstance’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (1999)

Coexistence, pluralism and the problem of toleration following the Civil Wars

• Carys Brown, Friends, Neighbours and Sinners in Early Modern England: Religious Difference and English Society 1689-1750 (2024)
• Carys Brown, 'Politeness, Hypocrisy and Protestant Dissent in England after the Toleration Act', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 41 (2017).
• Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649-1660 (2012).
• J. C. Davis, 'Religion and the struggle for freedom in the English Revolution', Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 507-30.
• Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637-45 (1997).
• John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English revolution (2007).
• Craig Horle, The Quakers and the English legal system 1660-1688 (1988).
• Robert G. Ingram, Reformation without end: religion, politics and the past in post-revolutionary England, Politics, culture, and society in early modern Britain (Manchester University Press, 2018).
• Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (2011).
• Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution 1630-1660 (2003).
• Anna Pravdica, ‘See sincerity sparkle in thy practice’: Antidotes to Hypocrisy in British Print Sermons, 1640–95’, Studies in Church History 60 (May 2024), 238-263.
• Naomi Pullin, Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750 (2018).

Atheism, unbelief and doubt

• Nathan G. Alexander, 'Histories of Atheism: Key Questions and Disputes', The Cambridge History of Atheism (2021), 14-33.
• David Berman, 'The Repression of Atheism', in A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (2013, c.1988), 1-47.
• John Edwards, 'Religious Faith, Doubt and Atheism: Reply' Past & Present 128 (1990) [reply to Somerville]
• M. Hunter, Atheists and Atheism Before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience (2023).
• M. Hunter and D. Wootton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (1992).
• Michael Martin, 'Atheism and Religion', in The Cambridge History of Atheism (2021), 217-232.
• Alec Ryrie, 'The Reformation and the Battle for Credulity', in Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2021), 44-74.
• John Sommerville, 'Religious Faith, Doubt and Atheism', Past & Present 128 (1990) [debate with Edwards].
• John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination; English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (1991).