Not simply the persistence of Greek and Roman comedy and tragedy, drama of the modern era had its rebirth in the liturgical performances within the church. Once the miracle and morality plays were moved out of the church, literally pro-fane, their secularized forms were soon suspected of degeneration, and the antitheatrical prejudice was promulgated. To control the possibly disruptive effects of the drama, censorship was introduced to spare leaders of Church or state from being maligned on stage. The Church of England may have been protected but Gothic melodrama found its villains and victims among the monks and nuns. Methodists, Quakers, Jews, dissenters, and nonconformists were targets for theatrical ridicule or abuse. Circumventing the proscriptions of the Licensing Act (1737), Shakespeare’s history plays provided a model for representing religious conflict on stage.

Nineteenth-century England had a large population of Christians who did not belong to the Church of England, and a proportion of Jews, though as yet almost no Muslims. The civic position of Jews had partly improved by this time. There was growing interest in the problems presented by what would now be thought of as ‘ecumenical relations’, with the first Lambeth Conferences giving the matter consideration, though excluding the Roman Catholics. This chapter explores the relationships between the main categories of non-Anglican Protestant Christians, including the ways in which they might be regarded as being part of the Church, that is, having an authentic ecclesial identity. The refusal of the Friends (Quakers) to take oaths was accommodated and the rights of Roman Catholics were thought through, with particular reference to Ireland. Dissenting academies were providing an excellent higher education.Problems were arising about the payment of clerical income and the costs of maintaining churches because non-Anglicans resented having to make a contribution.

This essay explores women’s antiwar activism in New York, California, and Kansas demonstrating the national breadth and regional diversity of pacifist and peace organizing. The essay identifies some of the individual women who raised their voices and pens against the war and includes some of the antiwar and pacifist organizations women created or joined including the Woman’s Peace Party, the People’s Council, and the Union Against Militarism. It argues that women of the First World War peace movement linked state-sanctioned violence in war with state-sanctioned violence against women, children, and the poor. Women thus contributed to the process by which the peace movement transitioned from defining peace as the absence of war to defining peace as the presence of social, economic, and political justice.

Chapter 6 focuses on the republican vision set out in Algernon Sidney’s posthumously published Court Maxims, which can be read as call to arms directed at the exile community on the Continent. This short work, written in the form of a philosophical dialogue, openly condemns the Restoration monarchy in England as tyrannical and calls for rebellion against the Stuarts. What marks out Court Maxims as a work of exile is Sidney’s increasing preoccupation with the balance of power in Europe, which he now came to see from another perspective as he was lobbying foreign governments to support his cause. Yet Court Maxims is also a deeply religious and heartfelt work, whose emotive attacks on the tyranny of the Stuarts and the persecution of Protestant dissenters ally Sidney at times more closely with Ludlow and a radical Puritan agenda than with the level-headed classical constitutionalism of Neville. Court Maxims also shares many key points with Sidney’s later Discourses, including its attack on divine-right patriarchalism, absolutism and the hereditary principle. Both works also address the issue of conquest and the people’s right to rise against unjust rulers, and advocate the rule of law and religious liberty.