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Dissenters: Britain’s Lost Faiths and Forgotten Radicals

A pilgrimage in search of Britain’s non-conformist faiths, the forgotten visionaries who founded them and the lessons they still have to teach.

Status: Being funded
Book: Signed First Edition Bundle
Regular price £30.00
Regular price Sale price £30.00

Description



Protestants believed that the world would end in 1600. It didn’t, quite.

For the next century, Britain was on fire. Civil war raged, the king was beheaded and London burned. But it was also the dawn of Enlightenment. The printing press spread overseas ideas and Captain Cook sought new horizons. The established church was probed and found wanting. Dozens of obscure groups sprang up: Ranters, Diggers, Levellers, Familists and Quakers, working people whose calling was both religious and political. Their ideologies ranged greatly but they were persecuted indiscriminately.

Dissenters breathes life into these forgotten visionaries. They were both everywhere and nowhere, and though they tread lightly, their legacies are still felt deeply today. Elizabeth Fry overhauled the prison service, visited every female convict ship bound for Australia, received a standing ovation at the world’s first anti-slavery convention, then promptly destroyed her journals upon realising she was famous. The Fifth Monarchist Prophetesses fought for gender equality. Diggers paved the way for common land ownership. Quakers were the first religious group in Britain to recognise gay marriage.

Dissenters uncovers four hundred years of moral protest. Through a series of British ‘pilgrimages’, award-winning writer Elizabeth Briggs unearths a rich, obscure corner of history that is almost, but not quite, forgotten.

About the Author

Elizabeth Briggs

Elizabeth Briggs is a writer, editor and occasional activist. Her work magnifies society’s fringes and history from below. She has written for Moxy Magazine, The Bookseller and Punch Magazine, among others. She also writes to inmates on Death Row through the charity Lifelines. Her prize-winning chapbook This Work of Art was published by A3 Press in 2019. She is a Commended Foyle Young Poet and a Finalist for The Field Nature Writing Prize 2023. You can find her and her writing at @litfactivist (X) and @_elizabethlines_ (Instagram). She is represented by Katie Fulford at Bell Lomax Moreton. Dissenters (longlisted for The London Library Emerging writers programme 2024) is her first book.

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