Letters and records of the dissenting congregations: David Crosley, Cripplegate and Baptist Church life

Anne Dunan-Page (1)

1 LERMA - Laboratoire d'Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone

This chapter examines the status and function of letters in manuscript records of dissenting Churches of the post-Toleration years, concentrating on the correspondence of the Baptist Church of Cripplegate. The letters are placed in the context of controversies about Church government and discipline and the rhetoric used during the scandal caused by the excommunication of its Northern minister David Crosley for drinking, lying and adultery is assessed. In doing so, the chapter pays particular attention to the epistolary exchanges between metropolitan and provincial congregations and to what they reveal about conceptions of the Baptist ministry.

Mots clés: religion; dissent; early-modern history; epistolary; Baptist; David Crosley

Domaines: Histoire; Religions

Anne Dunan-Page. Letters and records of the dissenting congregations: David Crosley, Cripplegate and Baptist Church life. Anne Dunan-Page and Clotilde Prunier. Debating the Faith : Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550-1800, Springer, pp.69-87, 2013, International Archives of the History of Ideas 209. ⟨hal-00834852⟩