English Nonconformist Poetry, 1660–1700

After the upheavals of the Civil War, religious dissent became a recognised fact of life in England and was finally, if incompletely, accepted in the Toleration Act of 1689. Nonconformists, although constituting a relatively small proportion of the population, produced a volume of printed material which belied their numbers. This body of work was heterogeneous and used for an enormous variety of purposes. In this, the first scholarly edition of non-conformist poetry, the editor draws together a representative selection of dissenting poetry.

The multi-faceted nature of dissenting verse is demonstrated, from the sonnets of the Quaker Martin Mason to the self-consciously ‘witty’ acrostic used to commemorate the Fifth Monarchist Vavasor Powell’s death, to the Quaker schismatic John Perrot’s ‘A sea of the seed's sufferings’. The edition is also the first to give extensive coverage to some of the most prolific and significant nonconformist poets, in particular, the Baptist Benjamin Keach and Robert Wild. English Non-Conformist poetry probes the boundaries of the poetic canon and provides the materials by which a set of silenced voices might be recovered and studied in their own right, thus revealing the cultural debt England’s literary heritage owes to the dissenting tradition.

The edition will benefit from extensive new editorial material, including a general introduction, volume introductions, headnotes, endnotes, textual variants, a chronology, a first line index and a general index in the final volume. It will be important for scholars studying Early Modern Literature and History, Bunyan, Milton and Shakespeare Studies, and Religious Studies.

Return to top