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The Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English

Existing Scholarship

The following is a selected list of specialist studies on the academies published in the last forty years, arranged by date. The findings of these works will in many cases be superseded by and should be checked against Dissenting Academies OnlineDatabase and Encyclopedia. For secondary studies on specific academies and tutors, search the Database and Encyclopedia.

  • Nuttall, G. F., New College, London and its Library (London, 1977).
  • Johnson, Dale A., ‘The Methodist Quest for an Educated Ministry’, Church History, 51: 3 (1982), 304-320.
  • Seed, John, ‘Manchester College, York: An Early Nineteenth Century Dissenting Academy’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 14:1 (1982), 9-17.
  • Jones, Peter, ‘The Polite Academy and the Presbyterians, 1720–1770’, in New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, ed. John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason, and Alexander Murdoch (Edinburgh, 1982), 156-78.
  • Smith, Barbara (ed.), Truth, Liberty, Religion: Essays Celebrating Two Hundred Years of Manchester College (Oxford, 1986).
  • Wykes, David L., ‘Dissenting Academy or Unitarian Seminary? Manchester College at York (1803-1840)’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 19:2 (1988), 102-12.
  • Sell, Alan P. F., ‘Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Academies of England and Wales’, History of Universities, 11 (1992), 75-122.
  • Watts, Michael R., ‘ “Surely we are to use ordinary means”: Dissenting academies and Nonconformist scholarship’, The Dissenters, vol. 2: The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity (Oxford, 1995), 265-84.
  • Fitzpatrick, Martin, ‘ “This candid and liberal method”: the Teaching of Philosophy in the Liberal Dissenting Academies of the Late Eighteenth Century in England’, in Recognitions: Essays Presented to Edmund Fryde, ed. Colin Richmond and Isobel Harvey (Aberystwyth, 1996), 481-510.
  • Kaye, Elaine, Mansfield College, Oxford: Its Origin, History, and Significance (Oxford, 1996).
  • Wykes, David L., ‘The Contribution of the Dissenting Academy to the Emergence of Rational Dissent’, in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1996), 99-139.
  • Kaye, Elaine, For the Work of Ministry: Northern College and its Predecessors (Edinburgh, 1999).
  • Mercer, Matthew, ‘Dissenting Academies and the Education of the Laity’, History of Education, 30 (2001), 35-58.
  • Rivers, Isabel, The Defence of Truth through the Knowledge of Error: Philip Doddridge’s Academy Lectures (London, 2003).
  • Sell, Alan P. F., Philosophy, Dissent and Nonconformity, 1689-1920 (Cambridge, 2004).
  • Shepherd, Peter, The Making of a Northern Baptist College (Manchester, 2004).
  • Hayden, Roger, Continuity and Change. Bristol Baptist Academy, 1690-1791 (Chipping Norton, 2006).
  • Stewart, M. A., ‘The Curriculum in Britain, Ireland, and the Colonies’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Knud Haakonssen
    (Cambridge, 2006), I, 97-120.

Isabel Rivers

 

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