The Presbyterians of Ulster, 1680-1730

by Robert Whan

2013 · Boydell & Brewer Ltd

A comprehensive survey and analysis of the Presbyterian community in its important formative period.The Presbyterian community in Ulster was created by waves of immigration, massively reinforced in the 1690s as Scots fled successive poor harvests and famine, and by 1700 Presbyterians formed the largest Protestant community in the north of Ireland. This book is a comprehensive survey and analysis of the Presbyterian community in this important formative period. It shows how the Presbyterians formed a highly organised, self-confident community which exercised a rigorous discipline over its members and had a well-developed intellectual life. It considers the various social groups within the community, demonstrating how the always small aristocratic and gentry component dwindled andwas virtually extinct by the 1730s, the Presbyterians deriving their strength from the middling sorts - clergy, doctors, lawyers, merchants, traders and, in particular, successful farmers and those active in the rapidly growing linen trades - and among the laborious poor. It discusses how Presbyterians were part of the economically dynamic element of Irish society; how they took the lead in the emigration movement to the American colonies; and how they maintained links with Scotland and related to other communities, in Ireland and elsewhere. Later in the eighteenth century, the Presbyterian community went on to form the backbone of the Republican, separatist movement. ROBERT WHAN obtained his Ph.D. in History from Queen's University, Belfast.

Reformation without end

by Robert G. Ingram

2018 · Manchester University Press

This study provides a radical reassessment of the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they were living during ‘the Enlightenment’; instead, they saw themselves as facing the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. Moreover, they faced those problems in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book examines how the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those revolutions and the thing they thought had caused them, the Reformation. It draws on a wide array of manuscript sources to show how authors crafted and pitched their works.