Polly Ha – författare

This volume brings together reformation and reception studies by exploring the relationship between reformations on the European continent and in Britain. The 11 papers shed new light on familiar associations, draw attention to under-explored relationships, and identify how British reception in turn contributed to continued reform on the continent. Different aspects of reception from biblical translation and book history to popular politics and theological polemic are addressed. The volume also prompts further questions regarding British integration and the perception (and invention) of England's 'exceptional' status.

The culmination of cultural and literary achievements in the final decade of Elizabeth I's reign coincided with some of Tudor England's worst years economically which were exacerbated by plague, successive harvest failure, and belligerence at home and abroad. This critical edition of the scribal publication 'Reformed Government' c. 1594 provides a unique point of entry into the 1590s. Recovering a pivotal moment in the history of puritan radicalism, it represents the most extensive reformed response to the onslaught of anti-puritan literature in the late sixteenth century, including Richard Hooker's ^iLaws of Ecclesiastical Polity^r. In addition to mounting an epistemological and ecclesiastical defence of reformed presbyterian government, it sheds light on new appropriations of Renaissance ideas about historical contingency, and introduces a dynamic reading of Christian antiquity. The edition also provides a wider context for later developments in the seventeenth century. Exploiting the instability of the period, the 'Reformed Government' seized the opportunity to re-imagine society and even anticipated the idea of altering civil and religious constitutions which theorists later developed in Revolutionary Britain. By expanding and reconfiguring the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical government, it imaginatively stretched the implications of historical change to entertain new possibilities. This recovery of an alternative vision of a reformed society in the late sixteenth century offers an alternative model for reading church history. Based on maximal visions and proposals of reform, the 'Reformed Government' is essential reading for the study of ecclesiastical tradition alongside confessional documents and summative statements.

The Puritans on Independence sheds light on the rise of new claims by puritans to freedom as 'independence' several decades earlier than modern scholarship has assumed. This critical edition of long-lost English manuscripts provides access to a set of treatises which are the most significant hitherto unpublished texts for understanding puritan debate over this concept of liberty. Although once mis-catalogued as anti-separatist polemic, they in fact document the presbyterians' clandestine 'First Examination' of Henry Jacob's argument for 'independent' liberty and ecclesiology. It includes Jacob's 'Defence' of his early congregational experiment in response to the 'First Examination'. The volume concludes with the presbyterians' 'Second Examination' of Jacob's 'Defence' in 1620, written several years after the erection of Jacob's independent church in Southwark. This work provides unprecedented insight into divisions among the godly in England before the public contentions over church government in the Westminster Assembly during the mid-seventeenth century. The introductory chapter traces the development of radical notions of liberty among puritans over the first half of the seventeenth century through to the English Revolution. All this had a lasting impact well beyond the British Isles and the early modern period. The edition will be of interest to early modern and modern scholars across many disciplines, from history and divinity to English literature and political science.

A re-founding of the history of independence and future of freedom through the eyes of ordinary men and women in the Puritan RevolutionDoes human freedom stand a chance in the future? Drawing on fresh sources, Polly Ha shows how ordinary men and women in Independent congregations in early modern England and New England introduced new foundational layers for liberty. They informed prominent spokesmen such as John Milton and Roger Williams. In doing so, they expanded the moral, political, and temporal conditions for securing the future of freedom before Enlightenment assumptions reconfigured those terms. Such sources include:• Hidden manuscripts documenting the earliest debates over independence• Self-narratives by women, youths, and other unfamiliar authors• Popular print, sermons, and commentariesChallenging a series of myths surrounding the origins of the liberal West, Ha offers an alternative account of this pivotal moment in the history of liberty. In contrast to elites, these Independents began to apply freedom more universally, conscripting a broader range of participants across gender, age, race, and social hierarchies. They developed a deep historical consciousness and drew from sources that extended beyond the Latinate world. Spelling out exactly what was at stake in these debates, they shed further light on basic questions about what it meant to be human in the face of an uncertain future.