The Puritans

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David D. Hall
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Transatlantic History ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Movement ◽  
The Church

This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role in the story of America. Shedding critical new light on the diverse forms of Puritan belief and practice in England, Scotland, and New England, the book provides a multifaceted account of a cultural movement that judged the Protestant reforms of Elizabeth's reign to be unfinished. The book describes the movement's deeply ambiguous triumph under Oliver Cromwell, its political demise with the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, and its perilous migration across the Atlantic to establish a “perfect reformation” in the New World. It examines the tribulations and doctrinal dilemmas that led to the fragmentation and eventual decline of Puritanism. It presents a compelling portrait of a religious and political movement that was divided virtually from the start. In England, some wanted to dismantle the Church of England entirely and others were more cautious, while Puritans in Scotland were divided between those willing to work with a troublesome king and others insisting on the independence of the state church. The book traces how Puritanism was a catalyst for profound cultural changes in the early modern Atlantic world, opening the door for other dissenter groups such as the Baptists and the Quakers, and leaving its enduring mark on what counted as true religion in America.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Ecclesiastical Reform ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Lay Experience ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and dissent, emphasizing that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640–60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of 2,000 Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. Nevertheless, in the half-century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.

Puritanism in Transatlantic Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-87
Author(s):  
Abram C. Van Engen ◽  
Evan Haefeli ◽  
Andrew Pettegree ◽  
Fred van Lieburg ◽  
David D. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global History ◽  
Indelible Mark ◽  
Transatlantic History ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American

Abstract David D. Hall’s book comprises a transatlantic history of the Puritan movement from its sixteenth-century emergence to its heyday under Oliver Cromwell and its subsequent political demise after 1660. Hall provides insights into the movement’s trajectory, including the various forms of Puritan belief and practice in England and Scotland and their transatlantic migration. In Hall’s sweeping view, Puritanism was a driving force for cultural change in the early modern Atlantic world and left an indelible mark on religion in America. The four reviewers praise Hall’s book for its monumental achievement, with Abram Van Engen emphasizing the centrality of Puritan theology. They place it within its historiographical context, as Evan Haefeli does by comparing it with Michael Winship’s Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (2018) and as Fred van Lieburg does by reminding us of the centuries-old German tradition of Pietismusforschung. The reviewers also raise critical questions as to the audience of Puritan publications and point to the benefits of studying Puritanism in an even wider comparative framework, one that looks forwards and backwards in time and one that speaks to the large, overarching questions raised by global history and digital humanities, including Andrew Pettegree’s ustc project. In his response David Hall begins by acknowledging the decades of Anglo-American scholarship on the Puritan movement on which his book builds, replies to points raised by the reviewers, and reflects on the situation of Puritan studies in the United States at this moment in time.

Reformers and the Church of England under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts

1980 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Christianson
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Church

During the past forty years, the religious history of Elizabethan and early Stuart England has received a great deal of attention from intellectual, social and Church historians. Because of the nature of the general interpretation traditionally followed, most scholars have found it fruitful to concentrate their research upon particular groups or individuals and to fit the ensuing studies into either a rather narrow stream labelled ‘Anglican’ or a very broad one named ‘Puritan’. While the number of biographies of English bishops and analyses of ‘Anglican’ divines has increased at a more than respectable rate recently, studies of English ‘Puritans’ and their brethren in New England have grown to almost unmanageable proportions. With all of these riches at hand, however, no recent historian has published an overall synthetic history of the Church of England under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts to match that completed by W. H. Frere more than two-thirds of a century ago. Indeed, a good deal of controversy still ranges over the boundaries and validity of such terms as ‘Anglican’ and—especially— ‘Puritan’. Plunging into that dispute, this paper will examine the nature and historiographical origins of these categories, redefine them so that they better apply to the evidence from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and spell out some of the social and political implications that spring from this modified point of view. While the argument presented here, no doubt, will neither please nor satisfy all historians working in the field, one hopes that it will provide some with a glimpse at the outlines of a new synthesis.

‘Truth Never Needed the Protection of Forgery’: Sainthood and Miracles in Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ (1625)

2011 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 270-283
Author(s):  
Sarah Scutts
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Polemic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Church

Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ was one of many texts produced in the early modern period which portrayed and assessed the Anglo-Saxon Church and its saints. This Protestant antiquarian work fits into a wider tradition in which the medieval past was studied, evaluated and employed in religious polemic. The pre-Reformation Church often played a dual role; as Helen Parish has shown, the institution simultaneously provided Protestant writers with historical proof of Catholicism’s league with the Antichrist, while also offering an outlet through which to trace proto-Protestant resistance, and thereby provide the reformed faith with a past. The Anglo-Saxon era was especially significant in religious polemic; during this time scholars could find documented evidence of England’s successful conversion to Christianity when Pope Gregory the Great sent his missionary, Augustine, to Canterbury. The See of Rome’s irrefutable involvement in the propagation of the faith provided Catholic scholars with compelling evidence which not only proved their Church’s prolonged existence in the land, but also offered historic precedent for England’s subordination to Rome. In contrast, reformed writers engaged in an uneasy relationship with the period. Preferring to locate the nation’s Christian origins in apostolic times, they typically interpreted Gregory’s conversion mission as marking the moment at which Catholic vice began to creep into the land and lay waste to a pure primitive proto-Protestant faith. In order to legitimize the establishment of the Church of England, Catholicism’s English foundations needed to be challenged. Reformers increasingly placed emphasis upon the existence of a proto-Protestant ‘strand’ that predated, but continued to exist within, the Anglo-Saxon Church. Until the Norman Conquest, this Church gradually fell prey to Rome’s encroaching corruption, and enjoyed only a marginal existence prior to the Henrician Reformation in the 1530s. Thus Protestants had a fraught and often ambiguous relationship with the Anglo-Saxon past; they simultaneously sought to trace their own ancestry within it while exposing its many vices. This paper seeks to address one such vice, which was the subject of a principal criticism levied by reformers against their Catholic adversaries: the unfounded creation and veneration of saints. Protestants considered the degree of significance the medieval cult of saints had attached to venerating such individuals as a form of idolatry, and, consequently, the topic found its way into countless Reformation works. However, as this essay argues, reformed attitudes towards sainthood could often be ambivalent. Texts such as Hegge’s prove to be extremely revealing of such ambiguous attitudes: his own relationship with the saints Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede appears indistinct and, in numerous instances, his understanding of sanctity was somewhat contradictory.

scholarly journals The New England Puritans: History, Social Order, and Gender

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Riley Bolitho
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Social Order ◽  
New World ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Church

The article will address the history of the Puritan migration from England to early colonial America, contextualizing their social order and gender in culture in the New World given special emphasis to their theology. The methodology employed is qualitative analysis of factors that: caused Puritan emigration and their early experience in Massachusetts Bay; organized their social structure; and illuminated the position of gender in culture. Generally, Puritans migrated out of New England for varying reasons but primarily out of deep-seated theological frustrations with the Church of England. Their theology is then described and assigned its place as the organizing principle of society; understanding this, gender is consequentially realized as not a particularly useful category of culture for the Puritans although we can observe how cultural works articulated women’s position in society—which was principally as wives, mothers, and worshipers.

The Book of Common Prayer: A Guide

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Hefling
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Corporate Worship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.

Grace and Freedom

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Muller
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
Ultimate Cause ◽  
The Will ◽  
Libertarian Freedom ◽  
The Church

Grace and Freedom addresses the issue of divine grace in relation to the freedom of the will in Reformed or “Calvinist” theology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century with a focus on the work of the English Reformed theologian William Perkins, and his role as an apologist of the Church of England, defending its theology against Roman Catholic polemic, and specifically against the charge that Reformed theology denies human free choice. Perkins and his contemporaries affirmed that salvation occurs by grace alone and that God is the ultimate cause of all things, but they also insisted on the freedom of the human will and specifically the freedom of choice in a way that does not conform to modern notions of libertarian freedom or compatibilism. In developing this position, Perkins drew on the thought of various Reformers such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Zacharias Ursinus, on the nuanced positions of medieval scholastics, and on several contemporary Roman Catholic representatives of the so-called second scholasticism. His work was a major contribution to early modern Reformed thought both in England and on the continent. His influence in England extended both to the Reformed heritage of the Church of England and to English Puritanism. On the Continent, his work contributed to the main lines of Reformed orthodoxy and to the piety of the Dutch Second Reformation.

Principal Booksellers and Publishing Outlets

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Religious Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
The Church

This chapter covers the publishing history of some of the main authors discussed in the book, the Congregationalists Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, and Elizabeth Rowe, the Methodists John Wesley and George Whitefield, and the Church of England evangelicals James Hervey, John Newton, and William Cowper; the publications of the major London dissenting booksellers, Edward and Charles Dilly, and Joseph Johnson; the printers and sellers for the smaller denominations, the Quakers and the Moravians; and some important provincial printers and sellers of religious books, Joshua Eddowes, Samuel Hazard, Thomas and Mary Luckman, Robert Spence, William Phorson, and John Fawcett.

Apprenticeship

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
English History ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
Moral Leader ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Town ◽  
The Church

In 1634 Fuller became the minister of the parish at Broadwindsor, in Dorset. This provided him the opportunity to know John White, the minister in nearby Dorchester. White, the spiritual and moral leader of the town became a pastoral model for Fuller. In this setting, Fuller wrote The Historie of the Holy Warre, the first English history of the Crusades. His use of medieval sources was extensive, and his analysis of the motives and tactics of western leaders is shrewd and persuasive. Elected to the clerical Convocation that met in 1640, during sessions of the first Parliament to be called in eleven years, Fuller dissented from the leadership of Archbishop William Laud, who sought to impose more stringent rules or canons on the Church of England. This Convocation, continuing to meet after Parliament was dissolved, passed canons whose legality was contested. War with the Scots ensued over religious issues, forcing the king to call what came to be known as the Long Parliament.

Theology in the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

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