Precise and Radical Puritans

Abstract

One remarkable providence of the year 2004 was the nearly simultaneous publication of two significant books on Puritanism in old and New England that explore overlapping themes in complementary ways. Theodore Dwight Bozeman builds on his definitive exposition of the movement's biblical restorationism, To Live Ancient Lives, with a magisterial study of how its precisianism-the drive for holy living and the godly reformation of church and society-awakened an antinomian reaction on both sides of the Atlantic.1 David R. Como, meanwhile, revised his Princeton University dissertation into an impressively wideranging and provocative book describing the first wave of antinomian religious radicalism in England in the decades before 1640. Though neither author had the benefit of the other's completed book, the two studies were written in dialogue with one another. Bozeman, for example, toned down his thesis that antinomianism was a substantially different religious form ("postand contra-puritan" [210]) in response to Como's critique in a journal article. In his text and in lengthy footnotes, Como engages material from Bozeman's book as it was published earlier in journals. Taken together these two volumes offer the clearest picture to date of the ways saints in old and New England embraced Puritan divinity in its mainstream and more radical manifestations. These two books not only deepen scholars' knowledge of the multidimensional qualities of Puritanism but also contribute to the larger field of Atlantic studies in which developments in England and Europe and in the Americas are understood as unfolding within interrelated contexts. For example, though the intensity of New England's