Justin and the other second-century Christian apologists endeavour to present their beliefs and life-style as a ‘ philosophy’ best compared with that of Plato, and Christians as a philosophical sect. This was a ‘quite implausible’ suggestion according to R. L. Wilken, commenting on Justin. Yet a number of outsiders in the second century do seem to have seen the Christians in such terms, although not as intellectually respectable as the apologists would have liked.‘What distinguished them from wandering Cynic philosophers?’, asks Stephen Benko, and replies, ‘Outwardly, probably nothing’. The evidence for these preliminary assertions will be sketched at the end of this discussion. But if this is a plausible reading of the reaction to Christians of such outsiders as Aristides, Galen, Celsus, and Crescens, and of Lucian's Peregrinus, it provides a context in which better sense may be made of the charges widely evidenced at least from Justin's time onwards and levelled against the early Christians, of indulging in Oedipoean intercourse and Thyestean feasts.. Accused of incest and cannibalism the Christians are thought to be practising a Cynic philosophical ‘naturalism’ that deliberately flouts mere social conventions. This affords a more plausible explanation for the indictment than that generally offered, namely the suspicions thought likely to have been aroused by any secretive religious group, a suggestion for which the evidence profferred is far from convincing.

Syon Abbey was a royal foundation established by Henry v in 1415. It was situated at Isleworth on the Thames, just across the river from the royal palace of Richmond and the Charterhouse of Sheen, and some three hours rowing time upstream from London Bridge. It was the only Bridgettine foundation in England. It was a double house consisting of sixty nuns and twenty-five men, of whom thirteen were to be priests; the abbess ruled over the whole establishment, but the confessor general, one of the priests, had spiritual jurisdiction. From the time of its foundation until its dissolution in 1539, the prestige of Syon stood high. The nuns included daughters of many well-connected families; many of the monks, like William Bonde and John Fewterer, had previously been fellows of Cambridge colleges or, like Richard Whitford, had served as chaplains to prelates and noblemen. The royal foundation and its wealth, the convenient situation close to a royal palace and within easy reach of London, the social status of the nuns and the intellectual calibre of the priests, and its high standard of religious observance all contributed to the abbey's prestige.

‘New Learning’ is a phrase familiar to historians of Tudor England as an archaic and somewhat arch synonym for ‘Renaissance humanism’, that is, for the revival of classical languages and literature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its speciously authentic flavour derives from its frequent occurrence in sixteenth-century sources. However, in its original context it had radically different connotations from those attached to it by recent generations of historians. For in the sixteenth century it was employed without exception as a description of religious error – predominantly as a pejorative term for what is now variously called ‘reformed’, ‘radical’, ‘evangelical’, or ‘Protestant’ religion. It is emphatically not the case, as is still often asserted or, more usually, assumed, that the phrase was originally coined to describe humanism and was only later extended to Protestantism.1 On the contrary the modern usage, given general currency by J. R. Green and Frederick Seebohm, arose from a mere misunderstanding of the original sources. This anachronistic and potentially misleading usage remains prevalent and has helped to sustain barely articulated but none the less powerful undercurrents beneath much recent work on early Tudor humanism, namely the notions that humanism was inherently a challenge to the doctrinal status quo, that it was inherently favourable to the cause of the Reformation, and that its progress was therefore resented or even resisted by the clerical establishment. Given the meaning now attached to ‘new learning’, such notions cannot but be buttressed by the myriad instances in which conservative clergy attacked it. The scope for confusion and the need for clarification can be illustrated by juxtaposing two statements, one from the sixteenth century and one from the twentieth, in which the term is used in apparently contradictory judgements of one and the same person. In a recent and perceptive article on Thomas Bilney, Cuthbert Tunstall was in passing described in the following terms, ‘A scholar and humanist, he favoured the New Learning and its advocates; and, although he was horrified by Luther, he was not closed to reforming ideas.’

In 1813, a century after the death of John Locke, an anonymous pamphleteer in London, writing under the pseudonym of ‘Abraham, saac and Jacob’, complained about the restrictions which were placed on the Jews. In The Lamentations of the Children of Israel representing the Hardships they suffer from the Penal Laws, the author recalled John Locke as a defender of the Jews, and quoted one of the philosopher's favourable comparisons between Jews and Gentiles. The author evidently felt that Locke's advocacy of toleration for dissenters in the second half of the seventeenth century could be applied to the Jews of nineteenth–century England: having argued in defence of non–Anglicans, Locke was believed to have argued for non–Christians too.

The vital contribution of women to the early development of English dissent, especially during the era of the Civil War and Interregnum, has received considerable scholarly attention since the appearance of Keith Thomas's seminal study in 1958. However, the focus of interest has chiefly been on the roles played by individual women as preachers or church founders, and no concerted attempt has yet been made to replicate analyses of New England Puritanism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which have highlighted the disproportionate numbers of women in church membership. There has been a similar lack of effort to document the effects of gender in determining English religious practice in the period after 1700, despite the beginnings of academic preoccupation with women's experience of Christianity in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and despite an abundance of evidence from sociologists and statisticians since the Second World War about women's greater performance on most indicators of religious belief and behaviour. This brief article therefore hopes to break new ground in assembling evidence about the strength of female support for Protestant Nonconformity in England from 1650 to the present day, using three distinct assessment criteria: membership, attendance, and profession.