Insular Christianity

This focused collection of essays offers a dynamic new perspective on the evolution of post-reformation religious communities within Britain and Ireland. It presents a host of unique insights into alternative models of the church across the entire archipelago by providing a wide-ranging comparison of two communions, Presbyterianism and Catholicism. Both religions aspired to the formation of national communities of belief but, periodically or permanently, adapted to the disempowered position of dissident or proscribed faiths. Deriving from the Insular Christianity project in Dublin, the book combines essays by some of the leading scholars in the field with work by up-and-coming researchers. The contributions range from synoptic essays which fill gaps in the existing historiography to tightly coherent research essays that break new ground with regard to a series of central institutional and intellectual issues and problems, including the role of the laity in sustaining extra-legal confessions, the complexities of toleration and the claim to churchly status, and the roles of intellectuals in forging the self-understanding of faith communities.This is a book which all serious students of the religious history of early modern Britain and Ireland should read. It will also appeal to those interested in the national histories of England, Ireland and Scotland who wish to learn how developments within the archipelago as a whole inflected the religious development of their own societies.