Joseph Priestley was one of the most remarkable thinkers of the eighteenth century. Best known today as the scientist who discovered oxygen, he also made major contributions in the fields of education, politics, philosophy, and theology. This collection of essays by a team of experts covers the full range of Priestley's work and provides a new and up to date account of all his activities, together with a summary of his life and an account of his last years in America. The book will re-establish him as a major intellectual figure in Britain and America in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The introduction of hymns and hymn-singing into public worship in the seventeenth century by dissenters from the Church of England has been described as one of the greatest contributions ever made to Christian worship. Hymns, that is metrical compositions which depart too far from the text of Scripture to be called paraphrases, have proved to be one of the most effective mediums of religious thought and feeling, second only to the Bible in terms of their influence.
This comprehensive collection of essays by specialist authors provides the first full account of dissenting hymns and their impact in England and Wales, from the mid seventeenth century, when the hymn emerged out of metrical psalms as a distinct literary form, to the early twentieth century, after which the traditional hymn began to decline in importance. It covers the development of hymns in the mid seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the change in attitudes to hymns and their growing popularity in the course of the eighteenth century, and the relation of hymnody to the broader Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and Unitarian cultures of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.
The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including the style, language, and theology of hymns; their use both in private by families and in public by congregations; their editing, publication and reception, including the changing of words for doctrinal and stylistic reasons; their role in promoting evangelical Christianity; their shaping of denominational identities; and the practice of hymn-singing and the development of hymn-tunes.

Philanthropy was an essential feature of the relationship between Dissent and the society from which it sometimes felt itself to be separate. This collection examines the contribution made by Dissenters from the Church of England to the history and development of charity and philanthropy in Britain from 1660 to the beginning of the twentieth century. It looks at the importance of charity and philanthropy in supporting Protestant Dissent and the causes with which it was associated; the part charity and philanthropy played in helping to fashion a self-identity for Dissent and for individual denominations; and the distinctive contributions made both by Dissenters generally and by particular denominations. Dissent and philanthropy intersect at many different points and levels: between the public and the private, the state and the individual, the voluntary and the organized. Philanthropy was an essential feature of the relationship between Dissent and the society from which it sometimes felt itself to be separate. Each chapter not only covers the contribution of a particular denomination but forms a case study of a wider aspect of charitable or philanthropic activity within Dissent as a whole. This volume is the first study which examines the contribution of Dissenters to charity and philanthropy, one of the most important developments in British society between the Restoration of Charles II and the outbreak of the First World War. CLYDE BINFIELD is Emeritus Professor in History at the University of Sheffield. His publications have concentrated on nonconformist history, in particular its social, cultural, and political contexts, from the late eighteenth century to the mid twentieth century. G. M. DITCHFIELD is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Kent. His publications include The Evangelical Revival, George III. An Essay in Monarchy, and The Letters of Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808). DAVID L. WYKES is Director of Dr Williams's Trust and Library. He edited Parliament and Dissent with Stephen Taylor and, with Isabel Rivers, Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian and Dissenting Praise. CONTRIBUTORS: Clyde Binfield, John Briggs, Hugh Cunningham, G. M. Ditchfield, Jennifer Farooq, Mark Freeman, Elizabeth Gow, David Jeremy, Stephen Orchard, Alan Ruston, David L. Wykes