The Reformation Era · c. 1560-1660 · England, New England
Puritanism
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About This Movement
Puritans were the English Protestants who thought the Elizabethan settlement had stopped halfway. That a church with bishops, surplices and a set liturgy still carried too much of what the Reformation was meant to clear away. Their real distinctiveness lay less in church furniture than in the inner life. They kept diaries, examined their own hearts in writing, and made the conversion narrative — an account of how God had brought you to faith, told aloud before a congregation. A normal thing for ordinary men and women to produce. Pressed at home, thousands sailed for New England from 1630. Those who stayed came to dominate the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, and after the Restoration of 1660 were ejected from the Church of England altogether.
Sources
- The diaries: Lady Margaret Hoby (1599-1605, earliest known Englishwoman's diary); Nehemiah Wallington's notebooks (London artisan); Samuel Ward's student diary (primary)
- The conversion narratives: Thomas Shepard's Cambridge, MA congregation relations (God's Plot, ed. McGiffert; The Confessions, ed. Selement & Woolley) (primary) — Lay men's and women's conversion accounts as delivered for church admission. Worth remembering the setting: these narratives were performed for a gate-keeping audience, which shaped how they were told.
- Practical divinity as used: Perkins (A Golden Chain; casuistry), Rogers's Seven Treatises, Bayly's Practice of Piety, Dod & Cleaver on household government (primary) — The how-to shelf of godly living - catechesis and conduct rather than system.
- The church-order record: An Admonition to Parliament (1572), Marprelate tracts (1588-89), subscription/deprivation records, the Dedham classis minutes (1582-89) (primary) — The movement's own semi-clandestine presbytery keeping minutes inside the establishment.
- Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), with Coffey & Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (2008) (secondary) — Field-defining classic and current survey.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6 (reference)