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

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.

• Introduction.- Religion and letter writing, 1550-1800, G. Schneider.- Part I Protestant Identities.- Scribal Networks and sustainers in Protestant martyrology, M. Greengrass.- Thomas Browne, the Quakers, and a Letter from a Judicious Friend, R. Barbour.- Writing authority in the Interregnum: The pastoral letters of Richard Baxter, A. Searle.- Letters and records of the dissenting congregations: David Crosley,Cripplegate and Baptist Church life, A. Dunan-Page.- Part II Representations of British Catholicism.- ‘For the Greater Glory’: Irish Jesuit letters and the Irish Counter-Reformation,1598-1626, D. Finnegan.- James ‘III and VIII’ and Catholic Kingship, 1702-1718, D. Szechi.- Every time I receive a Letter from you it gives me new vigour’: The correspondence of Scalan masters, 1762-1783, C. Prunier.- Part III Religion, Science and Philosophy.- Debating the faith: Damaris Masham (1658-1708) and religious controversy, S. Hutton.- Dining out in the Republic of Letters: The rhetoric of scientific correspondence, C. Preston.- Evangelical Calvinists versus the Hutcheson Circle: Debating the faith in Scotland, 1738-1739, J. Moore.- Questioning church doctrine in private correspondence in the eighteenth century: Jean Bouhier’s doubts concerning the soul, A. Thomson.- Index. ​