S. S. Thomas, Creating Communities in Restoration England: Parish and Congregation in Oliver Heywood's Halifax

摘要

Oliver Heywood would seem an ideal subject for detailed study. A leading figure amongst ministers in the north of England silenced by the 1662 Act of Uniformity, whose active nonconformist ministry in the parish of Halifax and beyond is recorded in a dozen or so manuscript volumes which he wrote over a period of forty years, and which survive largely in the British Library. Thomas's primary interest is community. He uses Heywood's writings to examine relations between conformists and nonconformists in late seventeenth-century Halifax to see how the local religious community was created and shaped. We are told it is Heywood's accounts of his own and his neighbours' 'daily activities as they attempted to negotiate the shifting social and religious terrain of Restoration England that are at the heart of Heywood's diaries, and thus at the heart of this book' (29). Surprisingly, for a study which relies so heavily upon Heywood's writings, there is no discussion of the surviving manuscript sources, quite the richest and most extensive record available for any late seventeenth-century nonconformist minister. But Thomas has not used the originals. He has relied almost entirely upon Horsfall Turner's late nineteenth-century edition of Heywood's notebooks. We are told that 'Turner's edition is competent and largely complete' (28). Yet a comparison with the original manuscript reveals that Turner's edition contains omissions, transcription errors, and silent editorial decisions. The edition does not meet modern scholarly standards. Thomas also fails to explain properly the complicated arrangement of the surviving materials, or the scholarly issues in using diaries and other autobiographical sources.