Protestant pluralism. The reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720. By Ralph Stevens. (Studies in Modern British Religious History.) Pp. xiv + 206. Woodbridge–Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2018. £65. 978 1 78327 329 4

• Published in: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 2020, Vol.71 (3), p.661-663
• Main Author: Ingram, Robert G.
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Comprehension; Conformity; Education; Legislation; Multiculturalism & pluralism; Religion; Religious history
• ISSN: 0022-0469; 1469-7637
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022046920000524

Protestant pluralism opens with a familiar account of the post-revolutionary parliamentary rejection of Nottingham's comprehension legislation, the rise of Dissent and the rival Church of England strategies for dealing with the new confessional competition. [...]the confessional angst which characterised the post-revolutionary decades informed clerical opposition to the various Societies for the Reformation of Manners, opposition ‘triggered by the involvement of Dissenters in their work’. [...]the Toleration Act, in the minds of many, left it unclear whether or not unlicensed Dissenting academies were legally tolerable: the legislative efforts culminating in the Schism Act of 1714 were, on Stevens's reading, an attempt to ‘restore clerical control’, but, crucially, to restore it ‘without explicitly overturning any provision of the Toleration Act, precisely because Dissenting education had established itself upon silences and ambiguities in the 1689 education’. From the perspective of the established Church of England's most robust supporters, the Dissenters also took advantage of the Toleration Act's silences and ambiguities to administer baptism and to establish chapels within existing parishes.