‘The Clerical Establishment’ of the inns of court ranged from lowly chaplains who conducted daily services to well-paid pulpit orators appointed as ‘lecturers’ or preachers to deliver regular sermons in the Temple Church and chapels of Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn. The advent of the preacherships and the prominent presbyterians among those divines who first held these positions has been regarded as signalling the strength of puritan zeal at the inns. But ‘The Elizabethan Experiment’ argues that both were actively encouraged by government as an anti-Catholic measure, rather than simply reflecting the benchers’ own religious preferences.

‘Moderates and Radicals’ shows that while most inns’ preachers from 1600 to 1640 were radical protestants, such zealots did not monopolise their pulpits. ‘The Puritan Lay Presence’ considers in more detail the religious attitudes of the inns’ lawyer members. While Lincoln’s Inn was the godly brethren’s stronghold, all four houses served as recruiting grounds and points of contact for those committed to further reformation of church and commonwealth. But if a combination of ideological and material forces tended to attract common lawyers to the godly camp, there were always lawyers anxious to support the established church and to reject its more extreme puritan critics.

Pufendorf was a political humanist, that is, an intellectual who engaged with political and religious thought through an erudite philological and analytical scrutiny of classical and modern texts in these fields. Born into a Saxon Lutheran clerical household in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, he had first-hand experience of religious and political conflict during his childhood. His mastery of Latinate humanistic erudition was formed through his rhetorical education at the Grimma grammar school and then through his studies in history, philology and politics at the University of Leipzig. Pufendorf used his humanistic erudition as a key resource in his fundamental reconstruction of the discipline of natural law in his Law of Nature and Nations of 1672. In this work he sought to provide a model of political authority suited to governing divided religious communities, in part to defend the Protestant religion against the threat of political Catholicism, but primarily to achieve peaceful co-existence among different religions under the umbrella of a secular sovereign state. His work as an historian and political adviser to the Swedish and Brandenburg courts reflects the engaged nature of his humanistic learning.

This chapter examines Protestantism’s relationship with human dignity in South Korea against the backdrop of the country’s modern history from the early stage of Protestant mission to the country’s democratization. Protestantism enshrines the biblical view of humankind as God’s creation. Since the first Protestant missionaries were sent to Korea in the late nineteenth century, Protestantism has influenced Koreans to respect the intrinsic value of every person. Protestant churches even played a vital role in protecting and promoting human dignity during the course of the country’s modernization, democratization, and economic development. This chapter demonstrates how Korean Protestants adopted and practiced the idea of human dignity, mainly focusing on their complicated responses to the country’s unstable political and social situations. Despite the risk of oversimplification, the chapter investigates this crucial topic by dividing the history of modern Korea into the three distinct periods: 1) early Protestant mission through Japanese colonization, 1884–1945; 2) independence through the Korean War, 1945–53; and 3) postwar national reconstruction through democratization, 1953–87.

In this chapter we address structural (long-term) factors that may affect the fate of regimes across the world in the modern era. This includes geography (e.g., climate, soil, topography, and waterways), Islam, European influence (via colonialism, religion, language, and demography), population, and diversity (ethnic, linguistic, or religious).

The conclusion summarizes the book’s interpretive synthesis, highlighting the major features of the Reformation in the Low Countries. It also offers a short comparative section in which the Netherlandish Reformation is placed in a wider European context and compared to other experiences of religious change in the sixteenth century.

This essay looks at the Christian context in which Britten lived and its impact on his work. When in 1940 he wrote that he was a member of a Christian nation, he could not have meant that Britain was a churchgoing nation, for most people were not active churchgoers. In fact, it would be necessary to go back to the seventeenth century to find a time when nearly everyone went to church. Britain was a Christian nation in the sense that its political, legal, ethical, and cultural life had been shaped by Protestant Christianity. By the 1920s this was a specifically English, rather than British, identity, for the disestablishment of the Welsh (1920) and Scottish (1921) churches, and the secession of the Irish Free State (1922) meant all three were intent on establishing their own distinctive identities and cultures. In mid-twentieth-century England, the Established Anglican Church, historically regarded as a ruling-class institution, remained closely associated with the monarchy and the state; thus, Anglican ritual governed public occasions and it was still regarded as part of an elitist and conservative Establishment.

This chapter expands the conclusions of II.2 to explore how Bayle thought it was still rational to be a Protestant, even if the mysteries of faith were beyond the grasp of reason. Bayle had been deeply influenced by certain Catholic theologians, above all Pierre Nicole and Antoine Arnauld, who had argued for the incomprehensibility of dogma, and the need to adopt a positive rather than a philosophical method in theology. But while for them this led to an emphasis on the authority of the Catholic Church, Bayle deployed the argument to defend (Reformed) Protestantism. For him, even if one acknowledged the incomprehensibility of the mysteries, there were still rational grounds to choose to believe some mysteries (e.g. predestination) over others (e.g. the Real Presence in the Eucharist). These reasons were grounded in historical testimony, approached probabilistically. In turn, we can completely revise of our understanding of Bayle’s debate with the so-called ‘rationaux’ (above all Jean Le Clerc and Isaac Jacquelot). Bayle was no more or less fideist than his opponents, who were no more ‘rationalist’ than him; indeed, Bayle’s position was directly influenced by Le Clerc. The debate between them was in reality a confessional one, with both sides accusing the other of rationalism. Le Clerc was arguing that Bayle was a rationalist beholden to philosophical determinism, and that a non-philosophical biblicism revealed the truths of Christianity – which happened to be Arminian. Bayle was arguing that Le Clerc was a philosophical rationalist beholden to the idol free will, and that a non-philosophical biblicism revealed the truths of Christianity – which happened to be Reformed.

Romanticism and Protestant Dissent are deeply intertwined; this essay reflects on the long history of their cross-connections. In recent decades there has been an upsurge of interest in the inspirational power of Dissenting allegiances to Romantic-era writers, and the rich literary culture of specific religious groups. Individual writers nurtured and encouraged by Dissent are being restored to prominence, and we are beginning to recover the importance of nonconformist discourse in shaping the literature and culture of the long eighteenth-century – such as the influence of Methodist life-writing and different forms of devotional practice. The essay outlines the diversity of nonconformist practice in the period, and argues for the diffuse and far-reaching impact of Protestant Dissent, through the familial and friendship circles of nonconformity, its educational institutions and publishing networks, and its influence on social and political debate. More broadly, it seeks to trace Dissenting affiliations and inspirations in the work of Romantic-era writers, exploring the case study of Anna Letitia Barbauld in detail.

Grotius’ earlier theological controversies concerned the authority of secular rulers and the normative status of the undivided church, principles given fullest exposition in De Imperio Summarum Potestatum. Meletius reveals deeper disagreements with the prevailing Calvinism, insisting on the distinction of core doctrines from theological speculations. The atoning death of Christ, expounded in De Satisfactione Christi, was of central importance to him, and his apologetic interest flowered in De Veritate Christianae Religionis, an exercise in natural theology. The later writings centre on his Bible Commentary and his writings on Christian unity. They reveal some changes upon earlier views, but no accommodation to Catholic doctrinal norms. The polemics with Rivet sharpened his opposition to Calvinism as a dogmatic system with an inadequate conception of the Christian moral life. His status as a layman of no church establishment exposed him to appropriation in support of later agenda that were not his. But his influence was widespread in later Protestantism of many strands.

Trying to find intellectual space between theology and raison d’état, the Protestant Hugo Grotius aimed to derive an autonomous sphere of legality from the natural inclination of humans to follow rules even when that might appear against their immediate self-interest. The rules he wrote into De iure belli ac pacis (On the Rights of War and Peace) combined a contractual justification of absolutism with a system of individual rights that he believed underwrote the spectacularly successful commercial practices of his native Holland. This rule-system would accommodate the actual practices of European warfare and government while also appealing to the better natures of European rulers. Unlike Gentili, Grotius viewed law as a moral science that engaged both the external behaviour as well as the conscience of those who govern.

From the 16th century onwards, the German academy offered a home for the most intensive reflection about modern statehood. German professors used the vocabulary of ius naturae et gentium (law of nature and of nations) to adapt the insights they had applied to the constitution of the Roman–German Empire to the world of European diplomacy in general. Statehood, it was suggested, was an instrument for the community to govern its affairs in a rational way. The notion of the Christian paterfamilias was given a secular meaning in the theory of the ruler as the manager of the state-machine that was to be operated under the instructions produced by a rational science of natural law. The fact that the practice of 18th-century diplomacy was hard to confine within the strictures of natural law theory, gave legal doctrine an often sceptical tone that pushed it ever closer to raison d’état.

Chapter 5 argues that food refusal resonates in the early modern theatre as a gendered mode of resistance. It begins by considering the contemporary phenomenon of 'miraculous maid' pamphlets, which recounted supposedly factual accounts of prodigious acts of religiously motivated food refusal. It then turns to Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) and George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1604). It places these plays in the context of changes to religious practice, contemporary understandings of the female body and the space of the household. It argues that in the context of female food refusal, hunger has the capacity to function as a form of parodic obedience to the norms of contemporary gender ideology. By carrying dictates of privacy and closure to a point of often terminal excess, these texts query or satirise the double standard within early modern English society.

This chapter addresses the ambivalent relation of Irish Protestantism to settler identity in the post-1922 period. In the Republic, Irish Protestants accommodated to the new state and majority Catholic government; in Northern Ireland, “a Protestant state for a Protestant people” took on the forms of a settler-colonial state. Protestant supremacy expressed itself in triumphalist cultural forms and in legalized and informal discrimination against Catholics. Northern Ireland offers a “laboratory” for the formations of the settler colony that clarifies the tendencies of settler-colonial entities: the necessary supremacism or racism, the sectarianization of working-class allegiances, the disproportionately violent response of the state to the demand for rights, and the necessity for the withdrawal of “mother country” support for a peace process to begin. Northern Ireland highlights how settler mentalities are the effect of a structure of dominance, not an unchangeable given. Analogies with Palestine/Israel are frequently invoked and the Northern Irish peace process might suggest a just way to end Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Northern Ireland indicates that the entrenched structures of racial or ethnic supremacy in settler-colonial societies are not necessarily permanent or endemic, but capable of transformation if relations of domination are dismantled.

The enshrining of religious freedom in international law has long been a Protestant project. Whether as theoreticians, advocates, or policymakers, Protestants played a significant role in securing the right for religious worship’s inclusion in major international treaties and conventions, and in explaining why it could trump national sovereignty. This was true in the era of “high imperialism” and brutal European expansion, most notably in the 1885 Berlin Final Act, which divided Africa between the leading colonial powers. Representatives of Protestant missions from Britain and Germany and Protestant scholars of international law were important in drafting a clause that guaranteed “freedom of consciousness and religious toleration” to both Africans and Europeans, and which allowed missionaries of all denominations to freely preach without state restriction. Protestant visions were also central to the establishment of the League of Nations’

In the era of the two world wars, internationally minded American statesmen turned their attention to meeting two objectives. The first was to engage the United States more with the wider world; more particularly to embed the United States within an international system dominated by European states but, with the inclusion of Japan, becoming increasingly pluralistic. The second was to use this new American global consciousness to reform the international system so that it accorded with the standards of civilization and operated along commonly regarded civilized norms. The codification and promotion of international law was one of the key methods of achieving these objectives; not coincidentally, many, if not most, of the key American internationalists of the era were lawyers.