History Of Puritanism Research Articles

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America

Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America

From the Editor's Desk

Hello and welcome to the Fall 2022 issue! I hope you are reading this while enjoying good health for you and your loved ones. Our health, along with the cost of living, has been foremost on many people's minds this season. There's a small amount of comfort in knowing that people of the past had similar concerns. As you'll read about in our three articles this issue, they also lived in interesting times. This is exemplified in the lives of three men: Dr. Josiah Beckwith, a Litchfield doctor in the Civil War; Jared Ingersoll, a tax collector in pre-Revolutionary New Haven; and Thomas Thornton, a Puritan during the witch-crazes of seventeenth-century Connecticut.The first article, Peter C. Vermilyea's “The Army of Exempts,” is also the inspiration for the cover art. Both illustrate the treatment of Civil War medical exemptions in Connecticut. How did the past treat people with medical conditions and disabilities? What does this say about manhood and patriotism? How does society treat doctors who perform necessary medical duties with little appreciation? Vermilyea's article covers it all.This article leads nicely to Jon Kukla's treatment of “The Weathersfield Affair.” Going back in time, from the Civil War to the pre-Revolutionary period, Kukla's article covers more societal anxiety, this time around the rising concerns over British taxation, particularly the Stamp Tax in 1765. This societal anxiety was displaced onto a single figure, Jared Ingersoll. Questions of patriotic action, individual choice, duty, and the cost of living loom large Kukla's narrative article.And a hundred years earlier, anxieties over health and duty led to Thomas Thornton's obsession with witchcraft. His presence at many of the New England witchcraft trials have long been overlooked by other historians. As Katherine Hermes and Beth Caruso reveal, Thornton was a linchpin figure for the anxieties of the time. In a way, all three men were.Rounding out this issue, we have Gregg Mangan, Director of Digital Humanities at Connecticut Humanities, and Emma Wiley the Digital Humanities Assistant, guiding us through “Teach It,” a digital primary source resource for the social studies classroom. This goes beyond regular digital primary resources and is an entirely new way of thinking about Digital Humanities, and how to get Connecticut students engaging in critical thinking, digital literacy, historical reasoning, and having fun.As in each Fall issue, this issue also includes a report from Connecticut History Day. Despite the continuing pandemic, Connecticut History Day 2022 virtually brought together over a thousand middle and high school students, with many students continuing to the National Competition. The projects, as always, illustrate that history will be in good hands. Congratulations to all the students.Tying in nicely with the articles and archival holdings are a book review, and an exhibit review. The first is a review of Michael P. Winship's Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America. Puritanism as a subject of historical inquiry is still going strong- as this review, and Hermes and Caruso's article show, there's a great deal more to learn. The second is a review of the Orange Historical Society's exhibit on SNET Telephones, offering a window into the lives of people during another technological shift.

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination

Michael P. Winship. Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America.

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Puritanism in Transatlantic Perspective

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.

Hot Protestants. A History of Puritanism in England and America, by Michael P. Winship

Hot Protestants. A History of Puritanism in England and America, by Michael P. Winship

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My Life with Hawthorne

My Life with Hawthorne

Winship, Michael P. Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. xiii+351 pp. $28.00 (cloth).

Winship, Michael P. <i>Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America</i>. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. xiii+351 pp. $28.00 (cloth).

Hot Protestants: A History of Puritans in England and America. By Michael P. Winship

Hot Protestants: A History of Puritans in England and America. By Michael P. Winship

Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America. By Michael P. Winship

Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America. By Michael P. Winship

Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America by Michael P. Winship

Reviewed by: Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America by Michael P. Winship Neal T. Dugre (bio) Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America michael p. winship Yale University Press, 2018 368 pp. In Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America, historian Michael P. Winship distills a lifetime of learning into a brisk and accessible introduction to the puritan movement. The book chronicles puritanism from its roots in the 1540s through its afterlife in the 1690s, a story unfolded in four parts, successive periods of reform distinguished by puritans' evolving struggles with each other, the Church of England, and their monarchs. While major events and personalities in this story will be familiar to specialists, Winship's feat is making a bewildering mess of political, theological, and social change intelligible to the novice without flattening his subjects (or losing any reader's interest). Key to his success are the "exemplary episodes, individuals, and experiences" that breathe life into the stony puritans of popular lore and stitch a disparate array of people, places, and ideas into a coherent whole (4). Readers seeking an entry point to the thicket of puritanism need look no further. Although the term puritan did not emerge until the 1560s, Winship locates puritanism's origins two decades earlier in the first years of English Protestantism. Part I examines these halting beginnings in nine decades dominated by two connected struggles: defining who "puritans" were and deciding "how to respond when your monarch or other authorities make a demand of you that you believe violates the laws of England and/or God" (4–5). What did Perceval Wiburn mean when he labeled puritans as the "hotter sort of Protestants" in 1581? John Hooper, whose story anchors the first chapter, offers some important clues. A Catholic monk turned nonconformist Protestant, Hooper [End Page 863] rose to prominence as a preacher during the reign of Edward VI. Edward, a more earnest Protestant than his father, offered Hooper the bishopric of Gloucester in 1550. Hooper reluctantly accepted on the condition that he would not have to wear the bishops' vestments, relics of Catholicism, during his consecration. The Privy Council granted this exception but reversed course under pressure from other bishops who argued that wearing vestments was not an individual matter of conscience, but a matter of civil law. Only an act of Parliament, they insisted, could eliminate them from the church. Hooper objected, but prison time and the threat of execution blunted his resolve. He soon took up his bishopric wearing the detested robe and hat. Winship encourages us not to dismiss Hooper as a loser in this fight, the first volley in the puritan quest to clean out the church's closets. The clothes did not define the man. Rather, Hooper "went on to embody the puritan ideal of a reforming bishop" so effectively that he was burned for heresy in 1555 under the Catholic Queen Mary (16). A hot Protestant, indeed. This proto-puritan's struggle to reform from within the church, moreover, exemplified what Winship calls the "toing and froing" that became a regular feature of puritan approaches to conflict (108). Following Hooper's execution, puritanism's definition as a "popular" movement (a negative descriptor meaning it appealed to ordinary people) ensured ongoing conflict with the Crown (41). The stain of "popularity" derived from Presbyterianism, a system in which a church's governing body was not appointed by bishops but "chosen with the consent of male congregants" (18). Under Elizabeth I, opponents of Presbyterianism began to characterize this form of church government as inherently antimonarchical, despite puritan claims to the contrary. These political undertones explain why Elizabeth and her successors resisted puritanism. Equally important for Winship, they helped expand puritanism by pushing some of its adherents outside England. Puritanism's geographic spread, whether to Geneva or Bermuda or Massachusetts, normally stemmed from conflict and begot more conflict. Yet Winship also captures the productive effect puritans honing their beliefs and institutions outside of England had for the movement as a whole. The innovations different locations enabled expanded and refined puritanism even as they destroyed it. Part II—which consumes more than onethird...

Representing and Misrepresenting the History of Puritanism in Eighteenth-Century England

An Englishman living during the mid-eighteenth century would have known that his country had been, at least since the late sixteenth century, a decidedly and, for the long-foreseeable future, an unalterably Protestant nation. But what sort of Protestant nation? One that needed a legally estabhshed church? And, if so, what sort of church should that church as established by law be? Did it, for instance, necessarily require a certain kind of church government? In its relation to the English state, did the church need to be the senior, equal or junior partner? And what rights, if any, should those not conforming to the estabhshed church have? These were vexing questions, and the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars had mostly been an intra-Protestant fight over them. Yet neither those internecine religio-political wars nor the subsequent political revolution of the late seventeenth century had resolved definitively any of the fundamental questions about church and state raised originally by the sixteenth-century religious Reformations. Those who had lived through the Sacheverell crisis, the Bangorian controversy or the fiercely anti-clerical 1730s recognized this all too well: historians, alas, have not.

Puritan Church Architecture and Worship in a Dutch Context

English Puritans have only a small reputation for aesthetic contributions to architecture. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they worshiped God without making a show of buildings or beautiful ceremonies; consequently, there are few grand Puritan architectural monuments. Nonseparating Puritans, blending into the larger church, put their emphasis on the pure preaching and practice of biblical religion, not on outward appearances. And the Separatists, the strictest of the Puritans, gathered in disguised house-churches. Because of this artistic silence it is easy to downplay the importance of architectural concerns in the early history of Puritanism. Whenever historians mention “Puritan” architecture or “nonconformist” architecture, they are likely to describe it as simple, plain, functional, humble, austere, and practical. While true as far as it goes, this description is not the whole story. An examination of Puritan discussions about architecture in early seventeenth-century Netherlands reveals the interplay of theological and practical factors in creating the “proper” church architecture.

New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance

Part I. Four Overviews: 1. Theoretical premises 2. A narrative overview of New England's literary development 3. Marketplace, ethos, practice: the Antebellum literary situation 4. Neoclassical continuities: the early national era and the New England literary tradition Part II. Three Representative Genres: 5. New England Poetics: Emerson, Dickinson, and others 6. New England oratory from Everett to Emerson 7. Literary scripturism Part III. Reinventing Puritanism: the New England Historical Imagination: 8. The concept of puritan ancestry 9. The politics of historiography 10. Fictionalizing puritan history: some problems and approaches 11. Hawthorne and Stowe as rival interpreters of New England Puritanism Part IV. New England as a Country of the Imagination: The Spirit of Place: 12. The cultural landscape in regional poetry and prose 13. The village as icon 14. Lococentrism from Dwight to Thoreau 15. Comic grotesque 16. Provincial Gothic: Hawthorne, Stoddard, and others Postscript Appendix. Vital statistics: a quantitative analysis of authorship as a profession in New England.

Makers of Puritan History. By Marcus L. Loane. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1980. 240 pp. $6.95.

Makers of Puritan History. By Marcus L. Loane. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1980. 240 pp. $6.95.

The Reinterpretation of Puritan History in Provincial New England

erty of Conscience allowed in the Worship of God.'l England's new official policy of imposed religious toleration ended forever the possibility of an exclusive religious community in New England and thus clashed with one of the most cherished aims of the founding generation. Provincial New Englanders confronted a dilemma, for they could not remain loyal to their tradition of religious uniformity and at the same time accept toleration. Those eighteenth-century ministers who wrote the history of New England, oddly enough, not only praised the Charter of 1691 but argued that toleration exemplified the best aims of the first American Puritans. What should have

Dissent and Catholicism in English Society: A Study of Warwickshire, 1660-1720

Puritanism has long fascinated students of the relationship between religion and society. Indeed, the social history of Puritanism has probably been studied more intensively than that of any other religious movement in modern history. However, most studies of Puritanism in England end either at the beginning of the Civil Wars or at the Restoration. The history of those Puritans who became Dissenters after 1660 has been left to denominational historians, who are understandably more concerned with the ecclesiastical and theological history of their own particular groups than with the broader question of the place of Dissent in English society.This neglect of post-Restoration Nonconformity is unfortunate for the study of the social history of Puritanism, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. When English Puritans are cited as the classical practitioners of the “Protestant ethic,” reference is often made to the success of Nonconformists in finance and industry after 1660. Tawney's application of the Weber thesis to England relies heavily on the writings of such post-Restoration divines as Baxter and Steele, and on the rise of Nonconformist capitalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tawney's hypotheses cannot be evaluated unless we have more information about the social background of Dissent: not merely a few exceptional individuals, but the group as a whole. From the practical point of view, quantitative studies of the social structure — both of the religious group and of the larger society—are more easily undertaken for the period after 1660 than for the period before that date.

The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England.

The publication of this important work marks another significant step forward in the post-Millerite elaboration of the social history of Puritanism in New England. Robert G. Pope provides the first detailed analysis of the workings and implications of that oft-discussed and much-misunderstood practice which eighteenth-century opponents labelled derisively the halfway covenant. His perspective is less the general doctrinal and ideational meaning of the device than its institutional meaning within the fabric of Puritanism as it operated on the level of the local church. He emphasizes that the need for a revised membership practice was inherent in the New England attempt to maintain sectarian ideals of church membership (visible saintship) within the context of a comprehensive (and publicly supported) church. He understands that the recommendations of the synod of 1662 and the debate surrounding them do not constitute the entire story of the half-way covenant, for the synod's recommendations meant something only in the context of their implementation by individual churches. From his detailed study of the half-way covenant in specific churches, two general conclusions emerge. First, as Edmund S. Morgan has suggested on several occasions, half-way membership served less to attenuate the sectarian nature of church membership than to enhance it. Second, the ministerium was far more willing to accept the innovations inherent in the half-way covenant than was the laity, particularly on the local level. Despite the importance and general persuasiveness of this study-or perhaps, because of these factors-several points of reservation should be raised. Assuming that Pope does not mean by his title to suggest that only the seventeenth century in New England was Puritan, the title is misleading. Pope is concerned only with the half-way covenant in the seventeenth century. For a microcosmic analysis of surviving church records (and leaving aside the question of whether his claim of having examined them all is valid), the seventeenth century is the easy one, and in many ways, less important than the eighteenth. The whole problem of the expansion of the half-way covenant with the enormous growth of churches in New England in the first half of the eighteenth century is omitted, as is the thorny matter of the relationship of the practice to the Great Awakening. One of Pope's few assertions about the eighteenth century-that New-Light ministers rejected the half-way covenant-at best needs much qualification. Even within the seventeenth century, one can question Pope's assumption that virtually all enlargements of membership criteria within churches constituted adoption of the half-way covenant, particularly in view of the sketchy nature of many of the church records with which he deals.