| My dissertation, "Jonas Cast Up at London: The Experience of New World Churches in Revolutionary England," offers a completely new way of approaching the history of religious struggle and debate during the English Revolution--blending the history of religious polemic and identity-formation with the history of the book and of print culture, and, for the first time, placing these epochal struggles over church government and religious freedom within a dynamic Atlantic context. With over one hundred printed books and pamphlets as my research base, my project uncovers the hitherto under-explored importance of English Atlantic colonial churches on the fiery debates over further reformation of the Church of England, and reveals a bustling world of preachers, polemicists and printers who refashioned the experiences of religious life in the Americas for English readers eager to recreate their own church according to what they took to be God's will. |
