New Book

A new academic book on our subject has recently appeared. The book is called Black Bartholomew's Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity and is by David J Appleby and has a Manchester University Press imprint. David Appleby lectures in early modern history at Nottingham University. See more here.

We have not seen the book but I have found this blurb elsewhere on the internet.

"A substantial contribution to the study of the farewell sermons, Restoration Nonconformity and the 1660s." Prof John Spurr, University of Wales, Swansea

It explores the religious, political and cultural implications of a collision of highly-charged polemic prompted by the mass ejection of Puritan ministers from the Church of England in 1662. It is the first in-depth study of this heated exchange, focusing on the departing ministers' farewell sermons. Many of these valedictions, delivered by hundreds of dissenting preachers in the weeks before Bartholomew's Day, would be illegally printed and widely distributed, provoking a furious response from government officials, magistrates and bishops. Black Bartholomew's Day re-interprets the political significance of ostensibly moderate Puritan clergy, arguing that their preaching posed a credible threat to the restored political order

The book approaches the texts, their authors and audiences from a number of angles: investigating the preachers' need to reconcile political loyalty with religious integrity; considering nonconformist and conformist sermons in terms of performance and rhetorical content and revealing how political comment could be surreptitiously broadcast. It demonstrates how the nonconformist message was affected by the process of scribal and printed circulation, discussing authorship, reception, marketing and censorship. In exploring the polemical responses to the farewell sermons, he argues that individuals within the Restoration establishment exploited the texts to pursue an anti-Puritan agenda which served to further their personal careers. Finally, an epilogue charts how the farewell sermons have been regularly repackaged over subsequent centuries.

The book is aimed at readers interested in historicism, religion, nonconformity, print culture and the political potential of preaching in Restoration England.

Contents
Acknowledgements
Conventions
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The context of Restoration nonconformity
2. Preaching, audience and authority
3. Scripture, historicism and the critique of authority
4. The public circulation of the Bartholomean texts
5. Polemical responses to Bartholomean preaching
6. Epilogue
7. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

ISBN: 0719075610
ISBN-13: 9780719075612
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Dimensions (cm): 23.495 x 15.875
Pages: 272