Dissent in American Religion, originally published in 1973, was the first book to present religious dissent in the United States as a pervasive but hidden and often-ignored stream in American life. The first volume in the Chicago History of American Religion series, it reviewed the history of our nation’s longest dissenting tradition—a tradition older and richer in the realm of religion than in any other facet of national life. Indeed, Edwin Scott Gaustad argued that religious dissent was essential to the character of the American religious experience and stood in profound disagreement with society’s orthodox values and beliefs.

This new edition, which reinaugurates the Chicago History of American Religion series under the new editorship of John Corrigan, features new commentary by Gaustad and Corrigan on the past thirty years of American religious history and the importance of understanding dissent in American religion today.

“This is an important and erudite work which shows the originality and scope which scholarship can bring to human experience.” —Los Angeles Times

“We shall understand the religious past and present better for reading Gaustad’s brief, well-written, helpful book.” —Commonweal

Errands into the Metropolis offers a dramatic new interpretation of the texts and contexts of early New England literature. Jonathan Beecher Field inverts the familiar paradigm of colonization as an errand into the wilderness to demonstrate, instead, that New England was shaped and re-shaped by a series of return trips to a metropolitan London convulsed with political turmoil. In London, dissidents and their more orthodox antagonists contended for colonial power through competing narratives of their experiences in the New World. Dissidents showed a greater willingness to construct their narratives in terms that were legible to a metropolitan reader than did Massachusetts Bay’s apologists. As a result, representatives of a variety of marginal religious groups were able to secure a remarkable level of political autonomy, visible in the survival of Rhode Island as an independent colony. Through chapters focusing on John Cotton, Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton, John Clarke, and the Quaker martyrs, Field traces an evolving discourse on the past, present, and future of colonial New England that revises the canon of colonial New England literature and the contours of New England history. In the broader field of early American studies, Field’s work demonstrates the benefits of an Atlantic perspective on the material cultures of print. In the context of religious freedom, Errands into the Metropolis shows Rhode Island’s famous culture of toleration emerging as a pragmatic response to the conditions of colonial life, rather than as an idealistic principle. Errands into the Metropolis offers new understanding of familiar texts and events from colonial New England, and reveals the significance of less familiar texts and events.

The forty texts collected in this volume offer a small but representative sample of Quaker women’s tremendous literary output between 1655 and 1700. They include examples of key Quaker literary genres — proclamations, directives, warnings, sufferings, testimonies, polemic, pleas for toleration — and showcase a range of literary styles and voices, from eloquent poetry to legal analyses of English canon and civil law. In their varied responses to the core Quaker belief in the indwelling Spirit, these women left a rich literary legacy of an early countercultural movement.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series: Volume 60