‘Man of moderation’

Abstract

Historians know Edward Reynolds as bishop of Norwich and a champion of comprehension after the Restoration. But by the time that he ascended to the rank of prelate his clerical career already spanned the decades of the Personal Rule, the English Civil Wars, the Interregnum and the crowning of Charles II. This chapter revolves around Reynolds the cleric and his moderate puritan roots, examining his ecclesiological writing and his relationships with different types of English Protestants. It seeks to trace – through the career of a man whose origins derived squarely from the so-called ‘Calvinist consensus’ of the early Stuart period – the enduring influence of moderate puritanism, described here as a set of seventeenth-century political and religious practices. Early modern conceptions of moderation have once again gained significant scholarly focus, with some of the most nuanced work asserting that the English penchant for a via media sat at the heart of an ideology of control and coercive constraints. This chapter provides further insights on how to think about moderation by adopting a practice-centred perspective. Thus tied to a distinctive narrative agenda, it breaks through the confines of the periodization perpetuated by traditional concerns with the causes of the English Civil Wars and Revolution.