This thesis examines various and changing meanings of the concept of 'heresy' in mid-seventeenth-century England as a way of deepening our understanding of religion and culture in early modern society.

While the varieties of religious sects which flourished during and after the English Civil War have been studied by many historians with differing emphases, there has been little investigation of the meaning of the label 'heresy' which was put upon the sects within the contemporary religious culture. This thesis critically examines various seventeenth-century books and writings on religious sects and questions how the term and the idea of 'heresy' functioned within the polemical exchanges during the Civil War and the Interregnum.

Following a detailed study of the 'heresy controversy' in the 1640s, the thesis scrutinizes major contemporary works on the subject. Issues discussed include the languages and imageries used to describe 'heresy' in Thomas Edwards' Gangraena, the construction of the 'catalogue of heresies' as a literary genre in Ephraim Pagitt's Heresiography, and the development of encyclopedic study of heterodox religions demonstrated by Alexander Ross in Pansebeia. It is argued that these works played an important part in constructing the understanding of proper or desirable form of Christianity.

The thesis further inquires how the debates about 'heresy' engaged in a process of redefinition of 'religion' as an idea. Attention is paid to the relation between heresiography-writing and religious pluralism as well as the later seventeenth-century discussion of natural religion. The thesis concludes that the debates on 'heresy' reveal not only the unique nature of the Civil War religious politics but also various and changing issues of religion in seventeenth-century England, from anti-Catholicism to the new experimental sciences and rational philosophies.

Copyright (c) Kei Nasu 2000