About: 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, 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