Antitrinitarianism and Unitarianism in the Early Modern World

This collection offers an innovative and fresh interpretation of Antitrinitarian and rational dissent in the early modern world. The central themes focus on the fierce debates surrounding Antitrinitarianism and Unitarianism that emerged from the Reformation and the lived cultures of these dissenting movements. The chapters take an interdisciplinary approach addressing ideas in context, their reception and appropriation, and the diverse and often conflicting visions of Christianity. Drawing on previously unused sources, many from Eastern Europe and often in inaccessible languages, this book challenges our understanding of dissent as marginal and eccentric and places it at the center of contesting convictions about the nature of religious reform.

PART I. Introduction.- Chapter 1. The Porous Boundaries of Dissent.- PART II. Antitrinitarianism and its influence in Italy and Poland.- Chapter 2. Italian Antitrinitarianism and the Legitimacy of Dissent.- Chapter 3. Scripture, Piety, and Christian community in the thought of the Polish Brethren.- Chapter 4. Religiosity in the Ethos of Polish Brethren in the Light of Funeral and Wedding Speeches from the Seventeenth Century.- Chapter 5. True heirs of Jan Laski: Polish Brethren church discipline in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and during their exile in Transylvania.- PART III. Transylvanian Unitarianism.- Chapter 6. The Late Confessionalization of the Transylvanian Unitarian Church and the Polish Brethren.- Chapter 7. Introduction of the Transylvanian Disciplina Eccelsiastica of 1626.- Chapter 8. Disciplina Eccelsiastica of 1626.- Chapter 9. The Term, Development, Purpose, and Practice of Church or Canonical Visitation Unitarians in Háromszék in the 17th Century Between Conventional Rhetoric and Reality.- Chapter 10. Some Aspects of the Hungarian Unitarian Liturgy in the 16th–18th Centuries.- Chapter 11. Engagement and Divorce Cases before the Unitarian Consistory in Seventeenth-century Transylvania. Frameworks in Church Law and the Doctrine of Marriage.- PART IV. England, Ireland, and New England.- Chapter 12. The Historical Critique of Heresiology in the Seventeenth Century and the Origins of John Milton’s Arianism.- Chapter 13. Authority, reason, and anti-trinitarianism: John Abernethy and the competing pressures within Irish Presbyterianism in the early eighteenth century.- Chapter 14. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer and its Adaptation in Eighteenth Century Rational Dissent.- Chapter 15. New England Congregationalists and Unitarianism in late 18th century/early 19th century.

Kazimierz Bem is Pastor of First Church in Marlborough (UCC), USA and a senior lecturer in Church History at the Evangelical School of Theology in Wroclaw, Poland.

Bruce Gordon is Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School, USA.