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.

The interplay between Christianity and international law … The terms “Christianity” and “international law,” as well as their relationship to each other, are not easy to understand – at least where there might be consensus. The aim here is to diagnose the elusiveness of these phenomena, to explain why this is important to understand, and to set the stage for further investigations.

So why is it that we cannot come to a consensus about this issue of “Christianity and international law”? If you are inclined, pause a moment with this text and build a list of possible reasons … Some contrarians might answer that we actually do have a relative consensus, that most reasonable people, at least with the opportunity to learn, find common agreement over most things and whatever differences simply reflect the diversity, the spice, the irreducible uniqueness of individual personalities and cultures.

After performing ritual gestures of mourning, Job’s friends sat with him in silence for seven days and seven nights. They ‘thoght that he wolde not have hearkened to their counsel’, the annotators of the Geneva Bible explained.1 Early modern English culture acknowledged bereavement as a harrowing experience and recognised the challenges consolers faced when trying to offer solace. Overwhelmed by the loss of a loved one, grief-stricken mourners might, like Job, be reluctant to accept the remedies of religion and philosophy. To be sure, those who indulged in excessive sorrow were castigated, but so were consolers when their insistence on faith and reason was felt to betray a lack of sympathy for the bereaved. The fictitious author of an answer letter included in Angel Day’s The English Secretorie, a letter-writing manual published in 1586, pointed out the inefficiency of the consolatory epistle sent to him by his ‘brother’, whose severity, he implied, was ill advised: ‘Follie were it for mee to thinke or you to beleeue, that the pensiue imagination of a thing so neere … coulde with the vehemencie of a fewe specches (more of zeale then equitie deliuered) be sodenly remooued’.2 The multiplication of formal templates for such replies shows that in England as well as on the Continent, consolation came to be perceived as a dialogic exchange.3 Epistolary practice and friendly ‘conversation’ opened up a conceptual space for debating the ethical and rhetorical limits of consolation.4

Toria Johnson interrogates the classification and portrayal of compassion in two major texts: the anonymous morality play Everyman (c. 1508) and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). Taking these plays as examples of pre- and post-Reformation approaches to compassionate interaction, she scrutinises a noticeable shift in attitudes towards the idea of pity, both as a fundamental human trait, and as an organising principle for human interaction. Whereas pre-Reformation plays like Everyman stress the volatility and unreliability of an emotion like pity – preferring instead the more established structure offered by charity – King Lear imagines a world without charity, and without the Church as an overseer of interpersonal exchange. Lear, she argues, reflects an emotional response to the Protestant revision of medieval penitential culture, and in so doing, Shakespeare imagines the possible consequences of England’s new emotional landscape. This chapter examines how the language, structure and ceremony of ‘compassion’ changed in the wake of the English Protestant Reformation, and how these shifts altered the way people experienced or understood the compassion of their communities.

This chapter examines the role played by sermons in developing the meaning of the term sympathy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. When sympathy first appeared in English in the mid-sixteenth century it tended to be used in its physiological sense to refer to a correspondence or harmony between people, parts of the body, objects in the cosmos or the soul and the body. In the 1580s, however, preachers began to use sympathy in a narrower sense to refer to a mutual suffering between individual selves. Drawing upon works by Edwin Sandys, William James and Henry Holland, Meek argues that sermons from this period reflect and facilitate a shift in the understanding of sympathy from the physiological to the emotional and metaphorical – and that this process existed alongside similar developments taking place in dramatic culture. Meek argues that meditations on biblical narratives and exemplars may have played a more important role in shaping the understanding of compassion in the period than humoral or medical models.

The ethics of compassion in early modern England was rife with conflict. This chapter reveals some of the fault lines within Protestant ethics. Ethos marks the spot where character meets culture, as ethics unites four distinct aspects: character, sets of protocols for behaving, particular sites for that behaviour and ways of representing these entities of character, behaviour and action. Bruce R. Smith takes up these aspects of ethics to consider how each contributes to understanding the workings of compassion in the culture of early modern England between 1560 and 1660. His chapter considers philosophical writings, legal documents, sermons, music and theatre plays from England in the century between 1560 and 1660, a crucial time in the religious and political history of the country. It pays particular attention to the reframings of the concept of compassion in Protestantism as well as the politics of compassions vis-à-vis people of other nations and other faiths. He concludes that the 'ethics' of compassion is, at bottom, a matter of virtue, but in more complicated ways than we might at first assume.

This chapter attempts in brief to rethink the history of magic by considering its relations with otherness. Otherness is conceived of as a relative and dynamic category, generated as the necessary result of claims to truth. The long history of the term 'magic' is characterised throughout by attempts to other it. The chapter pauses on several key moments in this history, ancient and medieval, before considering in slightly more detail the consequences of the Protestant Reformation for the imposition of a modern conception of magic. The rise of science and discourses of objectivity provide impetus for the modern othering of magic, and literature’s role in this process is examined through a focus on the rise of realism. The chapter then shows how the breakdown of consensus about the nature of reality in the early twentieth century leads to new forms of artistic expression, central among which is magical realism. It argues that throughout this long history magic, in a variety of forms, has displayed an extraordinary resilience, retaining its capacity to express important aspects of experience, society and meaning.

This chapter focuses attention on a visual motif that became synonymous with the Reformation; the scales of justice weighing the Bible against the vanities of the Roman Catholic Church. It traces the migrations and mutations of this iconography in English visual culture from the 1570s to the 1670s, examining the contexts in which it appeared and was viewed, including canonical Protestant texts, popular print, domestic decoration and the battlefields of the civil war. It is argued that, in contrast to the pictorial elaboration of similar iconography in reformed continental art, an ‘insular’ process of visual compression enhanced the efficiency and immediacy of this motif’s message of Protestant righteousness. In this synoptic form the imagery served practices of ideological and social cohesion as well as fuelling conflict and division. Like memory itself, the ‘weighing motif’ was repeatedly remade; it was reiterated but modified as it transferred between and across objects, places and spaces. Its success as a particularly memorable motif encapsulates an understanding of the Reformation as both defining historical event and incremental process; while its imagery commemorated a single moment of judgement effecting schism, its persistence and longevity emphasised and facilitated the ongoing struggle for reform.

This chapter explores how Tudor and Stuart families used portraiture to project and record their Protestant identities and reformed lineages over several generations. It asks why portraits as familiar visual sources displayed within a domestic context became important and considers how visual mnemonics were leveraged to secure spiritual status and determine ancestry or broader social status in a rapidly changing social order. The chapter demonstrates how the display of portraiture helped families recall and celebrate the personal narratives of their own Reformation histories in later centuries. It shows how portraiture could provide an assurance of constancy to reformed Christian ideals and a sense of spiritual stability over time, offering evidence of a potential pattern of election to Christian salvation.

This chapter focuses on the rise of the contraband culture in Hispaniola in response to the economic challenges the island faced during the last decades of the sixteenth century. Smuggling existed in some measure throughout the earlier years of the colony, but contraband as a widespread phenomenoninvolving all social groups of the island’s inhabitants appeared during the second half of the sixteenth century and had its origins in the lack of official trade and the search by local residents for alternatives to the Sevillian trade. By the early seventeenth century, contraband had become an intrinsic part of Hispaniola’s culture, and that of many other parts of the Spanish Caribbean. This raised the suspicions of some authorities and members of the clergy who feared the consequences that such close relations with foreign Protestant traders might have for the economic and spiritual life of the local residents. These concerned observers made no distinctions between French or English merchants. They were all seen as a threat to the economy of the island and the faith of its residents. This chapter also reveals the complete inability of Spanish bureaucracy to curve illicit trading.

Locke’s religion, although expounded unsystematically in his public as well as private writings, is an original and internally coherent version of Protestant Christianity, grounded in his painstaking analysis of Scripture. Locke’s endeavor as a theologian was typical of a biblical theologian who paid particular attention to the moral, soteriological, and eschatological meaning of Scripture, which he considered infallible. Moreover, virtually all areas of Locke's thought are pervaded by a religious dimension, and his reflections on several epistemological, moral, and political issues denote a markedly religious character. His religious views also influenced the development of various Protestant currents, such as Unitarianism, Baptism, and Methodism, despite the mixed reception that his thought met with among English divines in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Briefly, an accurate examination of Locke’s writings on religion, as well as his philosophical, moral, and political works, belies depicting him as a "secular" philosopher. Locke was the archetype of a "religious Enlightener" endorsing reasonable belief as the coordination of natural reason and divine revelation.

Chapter 2 focuses on the local support the three exiles found in their newly adopted communities on the Continent and in particular on the complex religious dimension of their European networks. Ludlow was moving mainly in Reformed Protestant circles, as might be expected from an English Puritan refugee, and Sidney too would seek his associates mainly among Dutch protestants and French Huguenots and former Frondeurs. Yet both Sidney and Neville also spent significant time in Italy, especially in Rome as the centre of the Catholic world. Their networks show that political allegiance could not always be related one-to-one to a specific religious creed and that personal friendships often cut across supposed political and religious divides. However, both Sidney and Neville also pursued a political agenda while in Rome, moving in circles that would allow them to gain insights into the future relations between the Stuart monarchy and the Catholic Church, while also shaping their own journey towards religious toleration.