The Mormon Moons of Lancashire: Accounts of Religious Dissent, Migration, and Persecution

New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty

Girolamo Donzellini was born in 1513. He was a religious dissenter, a physician, and a bibliophile involved in the Medical Republic of Letters. He was put to death by the Venetian Inquisition in 1587, after being tried five times in his lifetime. Extending beyond an individual case study to a granular and probing account of the many connections between Venetian physicians and heterodox religious movements in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, this innovative monograph reveals the heretical networks of physicians in sixteenth-century Venice. In addition to Donzellini himself, the web of actors includes printers, scholars, women, and alchemists who were all committed to fighting against religious dogma and violence in a time and place when both were the order of the day. This book will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the History of Medicine, the History of religious heterodoxy and tolerance, as well as the History of the Catholic Inquisition in Venice.

Secular and ecclesiastical authorities across early modern Scotland regarded religious dissent as a challenge to much that they held dear, and in the 1660s and 1670s, at the start of what has been called 'a last stand by the State and the Church against the rising tide of toleration,' they responded with waves of unprecedented repression and persecution.' This response was always justified, and sometimes motivated, by concern for the salvation of tender souls, the hegemony of the kirk, the security of the state, and the putative unity of the early modern community.2 Recent research has underlined the extent to which these concerns were mixed with or overridden by cynical calculation, in which popular fear and loathing were encouraged and exploited, and the power of the state appropriated for personal or party ends. The story has tended to be told from a national perspective derived mainly from central government sources, and has, understandably, focussed on the brutal campaigns against Covenanting Presbyterians in the South-West and real

In the article, the authors attempted to consider the urgent problem of the evolution of relationship between the government and the church at the everyday level of the people's faith without a chronological divide in the form of events of the 1917 revolution. Folk faith is a kind of apocrypha, generated by the daily adaptation of various religious teachings by the congregation, with their level of education and cultural development. The congregation within the boundaries of this work refers to the representatives of the simple social classes in the pre-revolutionary period, bourgeois and peasants, and ordinary residents of the Samara region in the Soviet period, that is, the so-called little man. This little man in such a multinational region as the Middle Volga region, was largely embraced, despite the russification and Christianization (Orthodox), by confessional and national traditions. In the late XIX early XX century, before the 1917 revolution, religious persecution in relation to religious dissent manifested itself in such practices of church and secular power as exhortation procedures, seizures of literature, objects of worship, in the rigorism of verbal culture, when offensive connotations were used in clerical work against Old Believers and sectarians. After the 1917 revolution, the period when the construction of ideology was only taking place is of particular interest. And, despite the ideological atheism of the new Soviet regime, despite the struggle against the church and religion, the 1920-ies were a period of some tolerance towards sectarians. This period continued until the 1930-ies, when the Soviet government already clearly led anti-religious and anti-sectarian policies. The study of the popular religiosity of the representatives of the Middle Volga during the period of social upheaval is necessary for the further improvement of religious-state relations and the formation of the spiritual consciousness of citizens, which confirms the scientific relevance of this topic. The purpose of this article is to examine the evolution of the relationship between the government and the church at the everyday level of the people's faith without a chronological divide in the form of events of the 1917 revolution. The results of the work done prove that everyday life, from the perspective of consideration, as is customary in ethnographic methods, from the inside, shows that the picture of the human world cannot change due to a change in the political system instantly. A person can adapt to the new rules of the game, but what we call the people's faith is much deeper, this is how a person behaves alone with himself.

In the Middle Ages, the control of lay speech regarding matters of religion and faith played an important role in the Church’s wider agenda of defining and policing the dimensions of belief in order to repress religious dissent. In medieval Languedoc, heresy inquisitors prosecuted numerous legal cases related to suspicions of allegedly illicit talk. The records of these investigations provide ample evidence of the variety of lay religious talk in medieval Languedoc, while also affording the historian a perspective into the active role played by the laity in religious persecution. Inquisition records attest to a culture of suspicion and hearfulness that was propagated by the authorities and appropriated by the populace. People monitored each other’s talk, were sometimes forced to answer allegations concerning their own utterances and were exposed to an array of countermeasures wielded by the authorities looking to suppress and correct unauthorized speech.

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 566 Thanks to its tireless editors, this collection has finally appeared in English, thus making the efforts of these Balkan historians available to a wider readership. UCL SSEES Bojan Aleksov Marsden, Thomas. The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia: Bibikov’s System for the Old Believers, 1841–1855. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2015. xv + 280 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. £60.00. Based on an impressive range of archival sources, this intriguing book probes an unfamiliar and revealing episode in Russia’s history: a two-year campaign at the end of the Nicholas I’s reign that featured ‘perhaps the most significant acts of religious repression in Russia in the nineteenth century’ (p. 28). In accounting for the origins and demise of the associated system of coercion, Thomas Marsden exposes profound tensions besetting Russia in the mid nineteenth century and offers new insights on the historical experience of a key group of religious dissenters. For decades before the 1850s Old Believers had enjoyed a basic toleration rooted in a grudging ‘condescension’ (sniskhozhdenie) reflecting the ideological and administrative impossibility of legalizing an alternative Orthodoxy. The first half of Marsden’s book recounts how even this paternalistic forbearance was eroded over the 1840s by a series of factors: the establishment of an OldBeliever hierarchy in neighbouring Austria; investigations by the interior ministry under Lev Perovskii into the civil significance of Old Belief; the discovery of seemingly subversive manuscripts at the Old-Believer Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery; and the work of statistical expeditions revealing an unexpected prominence of Old Belief in the provinces. All of this motivated Perovskii’s successor, Dmitrii Bibikov, to place the eradication of Old Belief at the heart of his political programme beginning in 1852. Indeed, a sense of emergency gripped the interior ministry, which moved energetically to persecute dissenters with fiscal penalties, the destruction of hermitages, the disruption of dissident gatherings and the curtailment of their civic life. Yet the assault proved short-lived for two principal reasons: the project generated opposition even within the autocracy itself, where many beyond the interior ministry became alarmed by its arbitrariness; and it depended almost entirely on the will of the emperor, so that when Nicholas died in 1855, his successor abandoned it — although without reversing most of its effects. Marsden thus concludes that in demanding a return to ‘the lawful order,’ Alexander II’s servitors ‘demonstrated that autocratic power was, itself, limited’ (p. 243). REVIEWS 567 Central to the ‘crisis of religious toleration’ in the book’s title was a critical shift in official thinking about religious dissidence. In the decade or so before the campaign, Old Believers were reconfigured as a political threat to the state rather than a spiritual challenge to the Church, not least because they were seen to inhibit the project of national unity that motivated many key statesmen connected with the interior ministry. In this regard, the campaign reflected a ‘secularization of the politics of toleration’ (p. 136) as well as an attempt ‘to replace imperial with national priorities’ (p. 243). The initiative thus came not from conservatives, who emerge in the narrative as proponents of lawful administrative procedure, but progressive officials who fretted that the persistence of Old Belief would render permanent and implacable a religious fissure between educated society and the people. Preventing this outcome, they thought, demanded urgent measures, and they therefore ‘compromised their progressive principles in the cause of national unity’ (p. 24) by identifying Old Believer leaders as political criminals and acting against them in an emergency mode. Ultimately, then, the crisis at the end of Nicholas’s reign ‘derived not primarily from the dying spasms of the unmitigated traditions of absolutism, but from newborn forces that struggled to realize themselves within a backward-looking political structure’ (p. 15). There is much to recommend in this book, starting with its very revelation of Bibikov’s system, which was unfamiliar to this reviewer. No less interesting is Marsden’s discussion of the campaign’s anti-capitalist dimensions, which were directed against eminent representatives of Russia’s emerging capitalist class who happened also to be dissidents. Marsden is especially good at...

After the Reformation began in 1517, Protestant ideas soon crossed the Alps and spread out of Italian cities, fascinating (especially, but not exclusively) the humanists and scholars who were part of the late-Renaissance intellectual environment. In particular, between the 1530s and the 1590s a great number of Italian physicians absorbed, promoted, and re-elaborated, often in radical terms, the reformed and heretical discourse. In this article I am presenting some research perspectives and methodological challenges concerning the application of social network research and digital humanities tools to the history of 16th-century religious dissent. In particular, I will discuss and examine the reconstruction, out of a sample of 200 cases, of a network of dissident physicians who faced religious repression and opposed dogmatic confessional boundaries in Italy, and in their European diaspora, as a part of my own ongoing interdisciplinary research.