Dissenters: Britain’s Lost Faiths and Forgotten Radicals
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.