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Conferences (2013–2015)

Dissenting Experience, Experiencing Dissent

From 2013 to 2015, three one-day conferences explored the collective experience of Independent, Baptist Churches and Presbyterian churches, 1600–1800, as a collaboration between Dr Williams’s Library, Aix-Marseille Université, the University of Liverpool and the Institut Universitaire de France.

  • Saturday 9 November 2013:   Church life: pastors and their congregations. Download the conference programme (2013) here . Download the conference abstracts here. Download the conference poster here.

A selection of papers will shortly appear in Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb (eds), Church Life in Seventeenth-Century England: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent, with Oxford University Press

  • Saturday 8 November 2014:   Varieties of Dissenting expression. Download the conference poster here. Download the conference flyer here.

A selection of papers has appeared in Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb (eds), Dissenting Hands, Bunyan Studies 20 (2016). To order, visit the ‘Publications’ page of the International John Bunyan Society

  • Saturday 14 November 2015: Scandal, Controversy, Persecution: Shaping Dissenting IdentitiesDownload the conference flyer (2015) here.

These three conferences explored the religious and social experiences of Independent and Baptist churches and their members during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the focus remained primarily on what could be termed the ‘gathered churches’, these conferences also offered opportunities to explore other aspects of the experience of dissent: from, for example, the perspective of Presbyterians and Quakers. The objective of the conferences was twofold : (a)  to emphasize the ways in which collective church practices and experiences shaped the identities of Independents and Baptists, alongside those of other dissenting groups and (b) to engage in a re-examination of the surviving dissenting sources held in local and national archives and libraries.