The Reception of Thomas Delaune's Plea for the Non-Conformists in England and America, 1684-1870
Citation:
Lewis, Simon, The Reception of Thomas Delaune's Plea for the Non-Conformists in England and America, 1684-1870, Church History, 2022, 91, 1, 41 - 61Download Item:
Abstract:
In a 1683 sermon, Benjamin Calamy, an Anglican priest, claimed that the separation of Dissenters from the Church of England was unjustifiable. Thomas Delaune, a London Baptist schoolmaster, responded in A Plea for the Non-Conformists (1684), which compared seventeenth-century Dissenters to sixteenth-century Reformers who had escaped from the “Church of Rome.” The Restoration authorities judged the book to be a seditious libel, for which Delaune was arrested, tried, and imprisoned in Newgate, where he was soon joined by his poverty-stricken wife and two children. By 1685, the whole family had perished in Newgate. This tragic story guaranteed Delaune’s status as a martyr for generations of Nonconformists. Indeed, the Plea achieved amongst Dissenters the reputation of an “unanswerable” text. Its enduring appeal transcended denominational and geographical boundaries. This paper explores the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reception of the Plea, which Dissenters, both in England and America, repurposed for various politico-theological circumstances. Throughout the eighteenth century, Dissenters invoked the Plea against perceived cases of episcopal tyranny. By the pluralistic nineteenth century, however, this external, episcopal threat had largely been replaced with an internal one, prompting Dissenters to deploy the Plea against corruption and lethargy within their own denominations.
Sponsor
Grant Number
Irish Research Council (IRC)
15299
Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History
Author's Homepage:
http://people.tcd.ie/lewissiDescription:
PUBLISHED
Author: Lewis, Simon
Type of material:
Journal ArticleCollections
Series/Report no:
Church History;91;
1;
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Full text availableKeywords:
Nonconformity, Book History, Persecution, Church of England, BaptistsSubject (TCD):
Book History , British History , Ecclesiastical History , History of NonconformityDOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009640721002869Metadata
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