The Sandtoft settlement in Hatfield Level is the best-documented of several refugee communities established on improved wetlands. Described via the resonant language of ‘plantation’, the settlement connects agricultural improvement in England to imperial expansion in the British Atlantic, acting in the service of empire and state while forging transnational Protestant networks. As improvers, the Sandtoft settlers were fastened to the crown’s agenda to produce profit, subdue commoners, and integrate marginal localities into the nation. As Calvinists and cultivators, however, they met with hostility in England: at odds with Archbishop Laud’s repressive efforts to demarcate a distinctively English Protestantism, while facing a violent campaign of expulsion by fen commoners opposing improvement. Interpreting these experiences through the transnational lens of Protestant adversity, the settler community entangled their quest for religious freedoms with their remit as fen improvers. Moving beyond dichotomous arguments about xenophobia in early modern England, this chapter traces how engineered environmental change forged lines of solidarity and separation.

Chapter 4 explores the central role of Huguenot ministers in maintaining and nurturing this confessional network as part of an international collaboration with the Calvinist church, noble leaders, scholars and other agents. Considers the refugee experience and establishment of stranger churches abroad, the navigation of theological differences and the part played by cooperation and conflict, especially in the French church in London. Focuses on connections to cardinal Châtillon and Regnard/Changy as well as other ministers involved in, and identified through, the correspondence, such as Pierre Loiseleur de Villiers. In particular, establishes the pragmatic day-to-day challenges that Huguenot ministers faced in serving their communities at home and abroad alongside bonds of faith and amity and the handling of disagreements. The varied experience and careers of the ministers are also compared and contrasted, as are the roles of other agents, particularly scholars and diplomats. Diplomacy and the negotiation of alliances were vital to the upholding of the Protestant and Catholic causes as was the identification of plotting by the other side.

This essay explores the Spanish Inquisition’s attention to individuals who identified with Protestant Christianity. In the 1520s, inquisitors first attempted to prohibit the smuggling of books. By the 1530s, they were also willing track Spanish Protestant sympathizers abroad, via family members of the suspects as well as networks of spies, and have them repatriated for punishment. The discovery of Spanish Protestant cells in Seville and Valladolid in the late 1550s -- whose members often intellectual and socioeconomic elites -- stunned the inquisitorial establishment, which did not succeed in catching all the suspects. Exceptional punishments even for the penitent were allowed by Pope Paul IV; dozens of individuals were burned at the stake in autos de fe between 1559 and 1562. The discovery of Protestants in the heart of Spain also facilitated the arrest of the archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé de Carranza, whose seventeen-year trial became notorious. Eventually, Spanish monarchs had to make concessions to foreign Protestants for political and economic reasons, and Spanish inquisitors only encountered scattered, small groups of native believers.

Wrestling with the eternal mystery of human agency, seventeenth and eighteenth-century Euro-Americans built cultures in which the idea of self-making could begin to take hold. Along the way they developed new mindsets about self-fashioning, ambition, the value of work, materialist consumption, and whether individuals or communities were the proper beneficiaries of people’s improvement. The eighteenth-century’s prominent cultural movements—the Enlightenment’s intellectual developments and the First Great Awakening’s religious revivals—were both context for and products of the growing legitimacy of human agency. In very different ways, their participants and storytellers engaged in transitions that made it possible to imagine self-making. Cotton Mather and other religious leaders struggled with witch trials, epidemics, and spiritual challenges, including how to respond to the Great Awakening’s popular enthusiasms. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin explored science and politics, invented useful devices and civic institutions. Uncertainties about human agency continued, but there was no doubt about the responsibility for self-improvement to serve God and community.

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

Max Weber understood how democracy in the seventeenth century was tied to Calvinist individualism and the rejection of external forms. Thomas Hobbes hated the consequences of puritan rule and argued that politics needed to accept the principle of the mask in order to create social order. The lawyer William Prynne in his Histrio-mastix portrayed theatre as the root of all evils in the royalist regime, but he himself proved a masterly performer in working to undermine the regime. The most radical democratic thinking came from the ‘Levellers’ who harked back to the Garden of Eden and natural human innocence. Shakespeare interrogated the ambivalent myth of Eden in Henry VI Part Two, as did Milton in Paradise Lost. The Putney debates constitute the main focus of this chapter. Common soldiers with Leveller views argued with their generals about constitutional principles. Close analysis of the debate reveals the complications that followed from claims to sincerity, couched as insistence that because God had spoken to them speakers were following their consciences, avoiding rhetoric or hypocrisy. The religious context in fact allowed a high level of democratic exchange.

This chapter provides essential historical and theological background for the emergence of Cambridge Platonism. It traces the fortunes of the Calvinist or Reformed (or less accurately ‘Puritan’) theological community in England, of which the Cambridge Platonists were members, through the civil wars and Interregnum, with a particular focus on controversy about predestination. It presents the major outlines of the Reformed doctrines of double predestination, election and reprobation, along with the rise of anti-Calvinist currents of thought like Arminianism and Laudianism, with a view to exploring the ways in which these theological disputes contributed to political tensions that gave rise to the civil wars. Finally, it explores the central role played by the Cambridge Platonists’ colleges of Emmanuel and Christ’s in the training of Reformed preachers and the dissemination of Reformed doctrine, with particular attention paid to Reformed attitudes to the study of philosophy and pagan thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle.

A central tenet of Reformed theology was the doctrine of justification by imputed righteousness: the faithful are not saved on account of their own righteousness, but purely by the gracious decision of God to ‘impute’ or ‘account’ the perfect righteousness of his Son unto them. While this doctrine was a popular target for broader anti-Calvinist criticism, this chapter demonstrates that Whichcote, Cudworth, More and Smith challenged the Reformed doctrine by producing an explicitly Platonic account of justification on which believers are rendered acceptable to God by deification (i.e. by direct, internal conformity to and participation in the nature of God). This model of justification is distinctive, even against the wider background of English anti-Calvinism, and provides one of the strongest indications of the close philosophical alignment of Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith. As the present chapter will demonstrate, to their Calvinist critics such as Anthony Tuckney, it was the Cambridge Platonists’ views about justification that constituted their most egregious departure from Reformed doctrine and that most clearly unmasked the ‘Platonic’ character of their thought.

For many anti-Calvinists, including the Cambridge Platonists, the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination entailed unacceptable conclusions about the character of God. Inspired by the fractious political climate, seventeenth-century English anti-Calvinists frequently accused the Calvinists of making God into an ‘arbitrary tyrant’, one who imposed his arbitrary will upon a hapless creation, unbound by any principles of justice or goodness. After considering the political and theological background from which this anti-tyrannical discourse emerges, this chapter examines the ways in which, in their attacks on the doctrine of double predestination, Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Smith all appeal to an explicitly Platonic notion of God’s unwavering intention to communicate his goodness to creatures as far as they are able to receive it.

This chapter considers whether and in what way Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith can be called ‘Platonists’. Was Platonism a part of the story they told about themselves, or that their contemporaries told about them, or is it simply an anachronistic label invented by modern scholarship? I argue that ‘Platonism’ was a live intellectual category in the Cambridge Platonists’ seventeenth-century philosophical and theological context and denoted a particular set of doctrinal positions which were associated with ancient Platonism, such as the primacy of God’s goodness over his will. The chapter also investigates evidence of a surge of interest in ancient and Renaissance Platonism at Cambridge in the latter half of the 1630s, centred at Emmanuel College, which included John Sadler, Peter Sterry and Laurence Sarson and also coincides with Henry More’s discovery of Platonism, and Cudworth’s early Platonic letters to John Stoughton. It is argued that these developments provide important context for the origins of Cambridge Platonism, and illuminate the ways in which Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith’s intellectual development was shaped by engagement with Platonic texts and ideas.

Like the rest of Northern Europe, the Low Countries experienced a wide variety of religious reform movements in the sixteenth century: humanism, Anabaptism, Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism and Catholic reform. In many respects, with its urban and rural diversity, the Netherlands could be seen as a microcosm of Reformation Europe as a whole. What made the case of the Low Countries distinct, however, was the political context: religious rebellion took place against the backdrop of the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Religious dissent grew inextricably entangled with political opposition to the centralising efforts of the Habsburg dynasty. This state of affairs led to the two key features of the Reformation in the Low Countries that distinguished from the rest of Europe: (1) an unusually harsh degree of official prosecution of Protestant heresy, and (2) the creation, by century’s end, of two distinct states, the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, because of the wars that Reformation at least partially instigated. Thus, while the ideas and qualities of the various reform movements in the Netherlands differed little from the rest of Europe, their outcome proved quite distinctive.

The distortions of Augustinian and Calvinist approaches to natural theology are noted, and the different approach of Eastern Orthodoxy is examined, especially in relation to the notion of noetic perception in the approach of Gregory of Nyssa and to its application to the contemplation of nature as understood by Maximus the Confessor. More purely ‘philosophical’ considerations are also examined, especially in relation to the ‘weight’ that is assigned to competing arguments. In this context, the concept of noetic perception is applied to the notion of ‘baptized reason’. It is suggested that in relation to the praeambula fidei approach of Thomas Aquinas, even scholastic versions of natural theology may need revision because of nuances in that work that are often unrecognized.

This historical chapter explains the origins of the ICRC in Geneva immediately before and after 1863 and the organization’s very early activities. It goes into some detail about the two key founding fathers, Henry Dunant and Gustave Moynier. The focus on two key persons gives flesh and blood to early developments for both the ICRC and the global Red Cross network that the ICRC initiated and helped structure. Religious origins are contrasted with secular evolution. Amateurism is contrasted with a quest for professionalization. Flexible decision-making is noted. Also mentioned are Genevan Exceptionalism and Swiss nationalism. This chapter allows a vivid contrast between the early ICRC and the organization it has become in contemporary times.

This chapter focuses on Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good (1710), in which Mather makes a series of proposals for how Christians might advance the gospel cause and exercise social benevolence. For this purpose, Mather creatively amalgamated different variants of the genre. First published anonymously in 1710 but quickly associated with Mather’s name, Bonifacius has often been considered an aesthetically and intellectually inferior predecessor of the American essay tradition, rather than its first full instantiation. Even so, the work enjoyed great popularity in the United States and Britain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin praised Bonifacius and acknowledged its importance in his early formation. This chapter investigates that connection and explores the relation between the sermon and the essay, dwelling on significant passages from Bonifacius and tracking its influence on a number of later philosophical and spiritual traditions.

This chapter concerns the place of predestination in Andrewes’ own style of divinity. On the one hand, because of the organising role of predestinarian error in Andrewes’ sense of puritanism and of the importance of puritanism as the defining other against which Andrewes constructed his own position, predestination was in some sense central to Andrewes’ thought. But on the other, since presumption was precisely what was wrong with the puritan attitude to predestination, a topic which the puritans thought they could subjugate to their own rationalist cross-questioning, this was an area in which Andrewes affected an extreme reticence. Nevertheless, what looks like an explicitly Arminian account of theology of grace can be teased out of his sermons and assigned a central role in his overall theology, which stressed the collaboration between the grace of God and human effort, the will of God and that of fallen humanity, enabled by Christ’s sacrifice and the ameliorating effects of sacramental grace to help people collaborate actively in their own salvation.

The Introduction is in three parts. The first introduces the object of study and the sources and methodology used to study it and puts the topic in its historiographical context. The second locates it in terms of the religio-political developments of the period between the 1590s and the 1620s. The third addresses the immediate political and polemical circumstances in which Laudianism rose to prominence and then power in the mid- to late 1620s, and then identifies the 1630 edition of Lancelot Andrewes’ sermons as the movement’s key foundational text or mission statement.

This chapter looks at fellow-travelling Calvinist conformists, that is to say persons who had always espoused a Calvinist or reformed view of predestination, who, on certain issues and in certain modes, could sound like any moderate puritan, but who, on the issue of conformity, took a firmly anti-puritan line, and consequently on certain other issues could sound just like card-carrying Laudians. It does so through the analysis and comparison of the careers of two such men, Robert Sanderson and Humphrey Sydenham, whose views on the theology of grace, conformity and puritanism, and indeed on some of the signature values of Laudianism, are analysed and compared.

This chapter sets up the problem of the relationship between Arminianism – defined as a set of propositions on the subject of predestination, at odds with Calvinist orthodoxy – and Laudianism as it has emerged in this book. Predestinarian error played a central role in the Laudian analysis of puritanism – it underlay a great deal of puritan presumption and hypocrisy, as well as their most divisive, indeed sectarian, impulses and behaviour. In addition, puritanism was the organising other of the Laudian project. All of which meant that predestination was a topic of great interest to the Laudians. But when it came to the positive case for Laudian reformation, to Laudianism as a style of piety and way of being Christian, the doctrine was far less central. Indeed, the topic tended to fall within the remit of those things best left unaddressed and certainly not subjected to the sort of assertion and counter-assertion that had recently threatened to plunge the Low Countries into chaos. However, the intensity of the Laudians’ repudiation of the puritans’ Calvinist predestinarianism more than implied the presence of a counter-orthodoxy and certainly called down accusations of Arminianism upon the Laudians’ heads.