John Coffey (historian)

John Coffey is a British historian who works on religion, politics and ideas in the Protestant Atlantic world, c. 1600-1850. He studied history at Cambridge and completed a PhD under the supervision of Mark Goldie at Churchill College, Cambridge, where he held a Junior Research Fellowship, before taking up a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College London. He has taught the University of Leicester. since 1999, serving as Head of History from 2013 to 2016. He has written monographs on Samuel Rutherford and John Goodwin and was an editor on the critical edition of Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae. His Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 is the first overview work on the topic since W. K. Jordan's four-volume work The Development of Religious Toleration in England (1932–1940). ^[1]

Recent publications

• Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford, Cambridge University Press, 1997 ^{[2] [3] [4]}
• Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689, Longman, 2000 ^{[5] [6] [7] [8]}
• John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, Boydell and Brewer, 2006 ^{[9] [10] [11] [12]}
• The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, ed. John Coffey and Paul C-H. Lim, Cambridge University Press, 2008 ^{[13] [14]}
• Seeing Things their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, ed. Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad Gregory, University of Notre Dame Press, 2009 ^[15]
• Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr., Oxford University Press 2014 ^{[16] [17] [18] [19]}
• Heart Religion: Evangelical Piety in Britain and Ireland, 1690-1850, ed. John Coffey, Oxford University Press, 2016 ^[20]
• Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall, Boydell, 2019 ^[21]
• The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, vol. I: The Post-Reformation Era, c.1559-1689, ed. John Coffey, Oxford University Press, 2020 ^[22]
• Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. N. H. Keeble, John Coffey, Tim Cooper, and Tom Charlton, 5 vols, Oxford University Press, 2020

References

1. "John Coffey". University of Leicester. Retrieved 28 December 2025.
2. Mendle, Michael (March 2000). "John Coffey, Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford". The Journal of Modern History. 72 (1): 186–188. doi:10.1086/315935. ISSN   0022-2801.
3. Simpson, John M. (October 1999). "Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford . By John Coffey. Pp. xii, 304. ISBN 0 521 58172 9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997. £40.00". The Scottish Historical Review. 78 (2): 267–268. doi:10.3366/shr.1999.78.2.267. ISSN   0036-9241.
4. Woolf, D. R. (1 April 1999). "John Coffey. Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford . (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 304. $59.95". The American Historical Review. 104 (2): 635–636. doi:10.1086/ahr/104.2.635. ISSN   1937-5239.
5. Lindley, Keith. "Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689" (PDF). Reviews in History.
6. Tighe, W. J. (1 March 2002). "Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689. By John Coffey. Harlow (U.K.): Longman, 2000. 244 pp". Journal of Church and State. 44 (2): 355–356. doi:10.1093/jcs/44.2.355. ISSN   0021-969X.
7. Freeman, Thomas S. (April 2002). "Persecution and toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689. By John Coffey. (Studies in Modern History.) Pp. xii+244 incl. 3 tables. Harlow: Longman–Pearson Education, 2000. £17.99 (paper). 0 582 30465 2; 0 582 30464 4". The Journal of Ecclesiastical History. 53 (2): 333–428. doi:10.1017/S002204690272424X. ISSN   1469-7637.
8. Gibson, William (March 2001), Review of Coffey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689, H-Albion, H-Review, retrieved 28 December 2025
9. Cogley, Richard W (September 2007). "John Coffey. John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England". Renaissance Quarterly. 60 (3): 1011–1013. doi:10.1353/ren.2007.0253. ISSN   0034-4338.
10. Blosser, Jacob M. (December 2007). "John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England, by John Coffey". Canadian Journal of History. 42 (3): 508–510. doi:10.3138/cjh.42.3.508. ISSN   0008-4107.
11. Parnham, David (2008). "John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England - by John Coffey". Journal of Religious History. 32 (4): 480–481. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9809.2008.726_8.x. ISSN   1467-9809.
12. Seaver, Paul S. (October 2008). "John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England". The American Historical Review. 113 (4): 1231–1232. doi:10.1086/ahr.113.4.1231. ISSN   0002-8762. Archived from the original on 25 March 2020.
13. Dixon, L. (27 May 2010). "The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism". The English Historical Review. CXXV (514): 702–705. doi:10.1093/ehr/ceq097. ISSN   0013-8266.
14. Cornick, David. "John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)". brill.com. Retrieved 28 December 2025.
15. Piggin, Stuart (December 2010). "Book Review: Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion". Journal of Christian Education. os-53 (3): 68–71. doi:10.1177/002196571005300308. ISSN   0021-9657.
16. Warne, Nathaniel (1 June 2016). "Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. By John Coffey. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. vii, 301. $34.95.)". The Historian. 78 (2): 375–377. doi:10.1111/hisn.12211. ISSN   0018-2370.
17. Selby, Gary S. (February 2015). "John Coffey. Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr". The American Historical Review. 120 (1): 226–227. doi:10.1093/ahr/120.1.226. ISSN   1937-5239.
18. Bejan, Teresa M. (December 2014). "Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King, Jr. By John Coffey. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013. 320pp. $34.95 cloth". Politics and Religion. 7 (4): 852–855. doi:10.1017/S1755048314000509. ISSN   1755-0483.
19. Balserak, Jon (December 2014). "Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr.. John Coffey". The Sixteenth Century Journal. 45 (4): 1092–1093. doi:10.1086/SCJ43920244. ISSN   0361-0160.
20. Randall, Ian M (3 July 2018). "Heart religion: evangelical piety in England and Ireland, 1690–1850". Baptist Quarterly. 49 (3): 136. doi:10.1080/0005576X.2017.1343925. ISSN   0005-576X.
21. Rogers, Ben (October 2020). "Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall (eds.), Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie". Scottish Church History. 49 (2): 146–148. doi:10.3366/sch.2020.0035. ISSN   2516-6298.
22. Tapsell, Grant (October 2024). "The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions. JohnCoffey, ed. Volume I: The Post-Reformation Era, c. 1559-c. 1689. Oxford: Oxford UP , 2020. xxi + 519 pp. ISBN 13: 9780198702238. £127.50; $165 (cloth)". Milton Quarterly. 58 (3): 103–107. doi:10.1111/milt.12495. ISSN   0026-4326.