The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725 ed. by Margaret Spufford

Abstract

The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725. Edited by Margaret Spufford. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pp. xx, 459. $79.95.) In The World of Rural Dissenters Margaret Spufford has put together a volume of material with much greater coherence than most collections of essays. Professor Spufford and a group of her former students, and other historians working in similar areas, address key issues pertaining to what one might call sociology of religious nonconformity in rural and small-town England in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.These questions have long puzzled historians: what was social, economic, status, or occupational profile of preReformation and later Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, and Familists; what types of communities fostered religious dissent and what does geographical typology of dissenting communities tell us about propagation of nonconformity; and what connections (if any) were there between places which experienced heresy early in period and other forms of dissent after Restoration? These are complex and weighty problems in their own right. In order to address them adequately, authors need to confront other ancillary problems as well; circulation of cheap printed material of religious and other sorts, nature of road networks and communications in late Tudor and Stuart periods, and surname turnover in different types of agricultural environment are just a few examples. In short, Spufford and her colleagues have brought to bear upon problem of rural nonconformity best of current English local historical practice.The results are stunning in their detail and provocative in their implications, and will pre-empt any tendency historians may have in future to make simple generalizations. One badly damaged generalization is notion that later were predominantly humble people, alienated from in which they dwelt: Lollards were not insignificant members of isolated communities.They were found at all levels of rural and county and they were totally intergrated into that society (p. 132). Likewise, those who were involved in later nonconformity spanned gamut of social types in Tudor/Stuart English society; later seventeenth-century sectarians and Elizabethan followers of Family of Love in rural Cambridgeshire emerge as neither the meaner sort nor a proto-bourgeoisie nor as splinter groups divorced from their parish communities. …