Puritan Movement Research Articles

Protestantismo, piedad y ética

In this article, it is considered the need to understand protestantism in terms of piety, since this is from which derives its ideology, its ethics, and its comprehension of society. When analizing the relation of the theological thought regarding contextual derivations, it is shown that the “protestant principle” that emerged from the Reformation in the XVI Century in the period known as “the Long Middle Ages,” it meant a form of protest that questioned, in an incisive way, the European christianity, since the Catholic church was challenged as a dominant institution and structurer of society’s habits and customs. However, even if the protestant reformation contained elements undeniably disfunctional in relation to medieval times, it was a renewal of the medieval spirit. It was necessary to look forward to the appearance of the Puritan movement with its comprehension of predestination and the divine order; so that a protestant ethics could appear with all of its strength, being capable of contributing to the emergence of capitalism and modern world.

Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London (review)

Reviewed by: Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London Francis J. Bremer Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London By Jonathan Beecher Field. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2009. One of the important developments in the study of Early America in recent decades has been the effort to place the story of England’s colonies in a broader Atlantic perspective. Jonathan Field Beecher makes a contribution to this perspective in his study of how various New England dissidents appealed to English audiences in their attempts to achieve greater security for themselves in America. He examines some of the same figures that featured in Philip Gura’s A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (1984), but whereas Gura was focused on how radicals such as Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton pushed the boundaries and reshaped the contours of New England puritanism, Field is interested in the radicals themselves and how they gained objectives such as the Rhode Island charter by appealing in print to English readers, including political leaders. Errands into the Metropolis offers individual chapters centered on Williams, Gorton, John Clarke, and Quaker dissidents. Within each chapter are to be found useful insights into how these individuals presented themselves and their cause, but the various parts of the book do not come together to form a coherent story. The concept of the book is very worthwhile. The story of how New England dissidents moved the debate over their situation to England is both important and neglected. However, there are two difficulties with the execution. One is that the author does not demonstrate a mastery of the complex nature of the English audience that may have read the arguments of the dissidents. During the decades of the 1640s through the 1660s England was divided between royalists and puritans and the puritan movement (which may be considered the target of individuals such as Williams and Gorton) was divided between supporters of various types of Presbyterianism, Erastians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and a variety of radical sectarians that included groups such as the Fifth Monarchists. Each of these groups had different views on what religious views should be tolerated and which should not. Furthermore, positions taken by these groups were influenced by the constantly changing alliances they entered into to gain their own objectives. In the mid-1640s, for instance, Congregationalists were less likely to criticize Baptists and other sects whose support they welcomed as they sought to prevent the establishment of a national Presbyterian establishment. Field does not draw on the extensive recent literature on the complexities of English views, and thus does nothing to inform his readers of which particular English audience was likely to embrace the colonial appeals. When he does address the issue of which puritan members of Parliament supported certain petitions (such as a chart identifying those who signed documents relating to Gorton) he does not explain their support in terms of their own religious and political views. And he fails to use an analysis of English divisions to explain why those who did not support the dissidents took the position they did. The second flaw in the execution of the approach is related to the first. The New England dissidents presented one side of an argument and in doing so initiated debates that engaged not only colonists who sent responses from New England, but also clergy who had returned to England such as Hugh Peter and Thomas Welde, and English ministers critical of religious radicalism such as Thomas Edwards. Again, the resultant debates took place in an evolving political and religious context that itself shaped the outcomes. There was an audience in England that both identified with the colonial dissidents and saw support for their cause as useful to their own English objectives. There were also always English puritans who were sympathetic to the Massachusetts authorities, even when the actions of those authorities jeopardized their own short-term objectives. In failing to examine the complexities of the English stage where his protagonists pursued their errand, Field misses the opportunity to realize the important possibilities present in his approach. Francis J. Bremer Millersville University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2011 Francis...

GAGASAN KHALED ABU FADL TENTANG “ISLAM MODERAT VERSUS ISLAM PURITAN (PERSPEKTIF SOSIOLOGI PENGETAHUAN)

The spread of the Islamic puritan movements, which have beeninfluenced by Wahhabism and Salafism, is not positive for Muslimsocieties. According to Abu al-Fadl, the role of moderate Islam tocounter those movements is very important. The main purpose of themoderate Islam project is to establish a strong civil society based ontolerance and respect for human rights. To do this, the moderate Islamtakes the moral values such as equality, justice, and protection of humanlife as the foundation of Islamic law. Therefore, if one finds acontradiction between the literal meaning of religious texts and the basicmoral values, the latter should be prioritized. Moreover, to interpretreligious texts, one does not only need religious traditional knowledge,but also modern social sciences and humanities.

Early New England: A Covenanted Society by David Weir

EARLY NEW ENGLAND: A COVENANTED SOCIETY by David Weir. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. Ecumenical consensus proposes full communion as the goal of the ecumenical dialogues. Within this ecclesiological vision, governance has three dimensions: personal, collegial, and communal oversight. The Catholic contribution to this vision is the ecclesiology of hierarchical communion, with its emphasis on the personal role of the bishops in communion with the bishop of Rome. This vision does not obscure the communal role of the whole People of God or the collegial structures whereby this personal service is exercised. The principal complementary gift to this hierarchical theology of communion is the covenant theology to emerge in the Reformed tradition . Under the sovereignty of God, the covenantal interdependence of the whole people of God is expressed in collegial structures to which any and all expressions of personal episcopé are held to be accountable. In the pilgrimage toward full communion, the gift of covenant collegiality and hierarchical mutuality will need to find avenues for dialogue and reconciliation. This volume is a summary of research on covenantal structures of governance , civil and ecclesiastical, in seventeenth century New England. During this period what have become the states of New England was part of old England. The pilgrim fathers set up colonies of separatist and nonseparatist Calvinist congregations in Massachusetts and other colonies of the east coast of North America, from Nova Scotia to South Carolina. Ironically, from 1642 until the 1660 restoration, the Puritan churches became the established Church of England. Those colonists who left England to separate from the established Church in order to establish a new covenantal, converted community in the new world became the state enforced religion in both old and new England during this period. The book, part of the Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, analyzes in detail the documents of this period—covenants, charters, contracts and confessions—their diversity and the covenantal theologies that lie behind them. In pursuing this study, the author has researched and synthesized a vast amount of unpublished material. He looks in detail at this rich array of documents, most of which are Reformed congregational in origin. But some are Baptist from the Rhode Island colony, or civil covenants, especially after the restoration of 1660, which allow for a certain range of Protestant religious diversity, following the acts of toleration in old England in the period of the restoration. The author is able to document the diversity of the approaches to the covenant relationbook reviews 537 538 the jurist ships, especially in the civil societies of the period, and to revise the received wisdom about the uniformity of the “Puritan Mind.” He is also able to document the evolution of contractual and constitutional thinking which developed out of the covenantal principles of the early Reformed colonists. This research is of interest not only to the scholars ofAmericanAngloSaxon Protestantism or of the wider Reformed tradition. Given the influence of British Protestantism on modern legal thinking, on the institutions of post revolutionary American society, and on the civil religion that under girds American public life, this study discloses important new insights on the commonAmerican heritage. Likewise, it demonstrates alternate modes of church order and governance to those of the traditional episcopal forms of the pre-Reformation and the Anglican heritages. Each community, intentionally and in light of their reading of the biblicalcovenant ,theexigenciesoftheirownrelationshipwithGod,withone another, and with the society they were building, developed its own formulationsofrightsandresponsibilities .Oncetherewasevenamodesttoleration in all of England, new and old; and charters for civil society were handed down by authorities, all of whom would have been authorized by the established Church of England in its restored episcopal form, the utopian, puritan experiment was inevitably due to unravel. Even more fundamental to the erosion of covenantal theology and the community of visible saints were the accommodations to the unconverted members of the community and to the children “born” into the covenant, but not themselves yet full communicants in the congregations. The book provides chapters on the European background of the puritan movement and covenant theology, and the early colonial charters of the century. There are chapters on the civil covenants, the church covenants for the Puritan congregations, and for those...

Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich c. 1560-1643

This book traces the emergence of religious factionalism within an urban community, from Elizabeth's reign until the outbreak of the English Civil War, focusing upon early modern England's second city, Norwich, but placing it in the context of England as a whole. Typically, Tudor and Stuart Norwich has been viewed as a centre of radical puritanism, but through careful study of its rich municipal archive as well as hitherto untapped diocesan and parochial material, the author offers a more rounded account of Norwich's religious life, which considers the appearance of groups at odds with the godly. The first section explores how and why the Reformation flourished in Norwich. Later chapters address the fortunes of the city's puritan movement in relation to successive anti-Calvinist bishops - notably Samuel Harsnett and Matthew Wren - and their local allies (both clerical and lay) during the 1620s and 30s. Reacting to godly complaint, Norwich's anti-puritan tradition evolved into something approaching 'civic Laudianism' in borough affairs under Charles I.

Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V (review)

Reviews 263 Parergon 20.1 (2003) been generally regarded as unexceptional, argued by historians such as Patrick Collinson in The Elizabethan Puritan Movement in 1967 (p. 375), well before any feminist challenges. Ancestors is elegantly written, as would be expected from a Harvard professor, and nicely printed. Its intended audience appears to be the educated intelligent general –American? – reader rather than teachers and undergraduates interested in the early modern period. There are no new agendas for historians of ‘the family’here, only another discussion of what many would argue is the blind alley of trying to decide whether families were loving in the past. There are better historical questions we could concern ourselves with. How did families differ at different stages of the individual’s life and at different social levels? How did women’s experiences of families differ from those of men? How can we counter the bias of socially specific sources such as first-person accounts, in order to understand the childhood of the poor? The histories of families in early modern times are far more complex than Ozment’s celebratory present-focused argument suggests. Patricia Crawford History The University of Western Australia Richardson, Glenn, Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V (Reconstructions in Early Modern History), London, Edward Arnold, 2002; paper; pp. x, 246; RRP US$21.95; ISBN 0340731435. Historians have a dangerous tendency to reify their own mental images of past times even though contemporaries might have difficulty in recognising the artefact so created. Dr Richardson has employed a phrase that has flickered in and out of the borders of reification. While formally rejecting the idea that these three rulers, all of whom claimed imperial rather than mere princely status, differed in any substantial way from their predecessors, he asserts that it is not merely a term of convenience but appropriate because of the times in which they lived, an idea that he does not develop further. They are, of course, the three monarchs who have most attracted widespread historical attention but he offers no reason for selecting them for particular attention. Richardson in this volume is neither concerned with analysis nor with demonstrating why in this reconstruction he chooses one explanation rather than 264 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) another, except in the one case of the fall of Anne Boleyn where he specifically asserts his preference for the Ives/Starkey viewpoint over that of Retha Warnicke. A brief introduction makes reference to anonymous intensive studies that have modified the ‘orthodox’ interpretations of the mid-twentieth century but the implication that a new and correct synthesis has now been created is not defended. The student is simply offered a brief synthesis of those subjects that Richardson finds most relevant to the lives and behaviour of Francis I, Henry VIII, and Charles (V of the name in the Holy Roman empire and I in his Spanish kingdoms). This new, early twenty-first-century, orthodoxy is described without much comment. As a result, the book tends to resemble a series of linked encyclopaedia entries providing a short introduction to individual topics but not an articulated argument. It will be useful for those who want, for example, an introduction to the names of the main families involved in the government of the different countries, or the outline of the social hierarchy, but not to those who would like a clear picture of the comparative resources and independence of those families in the different areas. As a result, teachers seeking to stimulate their students’ ability critically to read, analyse and challenge a particular viewpoint or explanation will not be able to use this volume to provide one side of the argument since it uses the voice of authority not the voice of persuasion. Although it may be a useful compendium from which a student could start, there is no guide to the topics omitted (the role of the queen, strikes me, for example) or assertions that others may find dubious. The selected further reading provided is largely monolingual, suggesting that the perceived audience is English speaking. Richardson does not justify his concentration on these three monarchs whom he rightly terms important, but who...

Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy on Trial: A Review Essay

Louise A. Breen. Trangressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 292 pp. Sargent Bush, Jr., ed. The Correspondence of John Cotton. Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 548 pp. Michael P. Winship. Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 322 pp. In the midst of an entangled “crisis” that appeared to threaten the very being of newly founded Massachusetts, one close observer of the situation in 1636 and 1637 felt that little of substance separated the warring parties: “few could see where the difference was; and indeed it seemed so small, as (if men's affections had not been formerly lienated, when the differences were […] stated as fundamental) they might easily have come to reconciliation.” Other contemporaries painted the crisis in starker colors, invoking, as John Wheelwright did in a fast-day sermon of January 1637, the combat between the forces of Christ and the followers of the Anti-Christ and summoning the “children of God” to “prepare for a spirituall combate” against their enemies.The Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Richard S. Dunn et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) 216 ; David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968) 158–59. By and large, modern historians have sided with Wheelwright in emphasizing the seriousness of the “Antinomian controversy,” as the crisis is conventionally termed. Its modern interpreters disagree, however, on what was at issue and on the relationship of the controversy to the underlying dynamics of the Puritan movement. Two new books by young historians add to this debate in important ways, and a third volume, a scrupulously edited collection of the letters of the Reverend John Cotton, advances our understanding of a minister whose sermons to his Boston congregation helped precipitate the crisis.

The Correspondence of John Cotton

John Cotton (1584-1652) was a key figure in the English Puritan movement in the first half of the 17th century, a respected leader among his generation of emigrants from England to New England. This volume collects all known surviving correspondence by and to Cotton. These 125 letters - more than 50 of which are published here for the first time - span the decades between 1621 and 1652, a period of great activity and change in the Puritan movement and in English history. Now carefully edited, annotated and contextualized, the letters chart the trajectory of Cotton's career and revive a variety of voices from the troubled times surrounding Charles I's reign, including those of such prominent figures as Oliver Cromwell, Bishop John Willians, John Dod and Thomas Hooker, as well as many little-known persons who wrote to Cotton for advice and guidance. Among the treasures of early Anglo-American history, these letters bring to life the leading Puritan intellectual of the generation of the Great Migration and illustrate the network of mutual support that nourished an intellectual and spiritual movement through difficult times.

Shorter note. Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England. The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620-1643. Tom Webster

Shorter note. Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England. The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620-1643. Tom Webster

Shorter note. Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England. The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620-1643. Tom Webster

Shorter note. Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England. The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620-1643. Tom Webster A Hughes A Hughes University of Keele, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 114, Issue 457, June 1999, Pages 710–711, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/114.457.710-a Published: 01 June 1999

Tom Webster. <italic>Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643</italic>. (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xv, 350. $64.95

Tom Webster. Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643. (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xv, 350. $64.95 Webster Tom. Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643. (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xv, 350. $64.95. Margo Todd Margo Todd Vanderbilt University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 104, Issue 2, April 1999, Pages 631–632, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/104.2.631 Published: 01 April 1999

‘FRANTICK HACKET’: PROPHECY, SORCERY, INSANITY, AND THE ELIZABETHAN PURITAN MOVEMENT

This essay reconsiders the career of the most famous of Elizabethan false prophets, William Hacket, the illiterate pseudo-messiah who, together with two gentleman disciples, plotted a civil and ecclesiastical coup, and was executed for treason in July 1591. It explores the significance of autonomous lay activity on the fringes of the mainstream puritan movement, demonstrating links between the dissident trio and key clerical figures who later prudently disowned them. Closer inspection of Hacket's exploits sheds fresh light on the relationship between experimental Calvinist piety and the religious and magical culture of the unlettered rural laity – a relationship still widely presented as bitterly adversarial. Relocated in the context of contemporary attitudes to prophecy and insanity, the episode illuminates the eclecticism of early modern belief and the manner in which medical and theological explanations for bizarre behaviour comfortably coexisted and mingled. Variously labelled a witch, visionary, and raving lunatic, Hacket's case reveals the extent to which such roles, diagnoses, and stereotypes are socially, culturally, and politically shaped and conditioned. In exploiting the incident to discredit Presbyterian activism within the Church of England, leading conformist polemicists anticipated the main thrust of the campaign against religious ‘enthusiasm’ mounted by Anglican elites in the Interregnum, Restoration, and early Enlightenment.

Women, Prophecy, and Authority in Early Stuart Puritanism

Hx .I istorians of early modern England have begun to explore the important role of women in the story of Puritanism. As Patrick Collinson and Thomas Freeman have noted, godly women were at the epicenter of the Puritan movement from its earliest stages-not mere bystanders, but in fact close confidants and financial backers of well-known Marian and Elizabethan Protestants.' That this tradition of avid female participation persisted into the seventeenth century is beyond doubt. More contestable is the question of the nature and consequences of such participation. Despite recent advances, we remain in many ways ignorant of the precise manner in which women fit into the community of the godly. How did Puritan women interact with their male Puritan counterparts? How, in turn, did godliness, in both its personal and social aspects, affect the capacity of women to make their way in the deeply patriarchal social world of early modern England? Important studies by Diane Willen and Peter Lake have suggested that although Puritan divines habitually urged female submission and subordination, the daily consequences of Puritan pastoral divinity-intense experiences of divine love or union, reciprocal and almost egalitarian lay-clerical relationships, a sense of spiritual or moral authority, and an almost inevitable civic awareness and

Muslim fundamentalism: Something to be understood or to be explained away?

Abstract This article surveys various attempts to make sociological sense of the diverse Muslim movements often lumped together under the label of fundamentalism. Explanations of fundamentalism as a form of resistance to modernization or those reducing it to social and economic discontent may have some prima facie plausibility but fail to explain why this protest takes a religious form. Orientalist studies emphasizing the theological dimension, on the other hand, do not even attempt to explain why certain religious ideas rather than others can inspire social movements. Not all fundamentalist movements, in fact, are inspired by the same or even similar theological ideas; besides puritan fundamentalist movements we also find many that are strongly influenced by Sufism. Empirical studies of Islamic militants in several different countries indicate that they are not, as is often assumed, marginalized and alienated but relatively well‐integrated and successful persons. Muslim fundamentalist movements have perh...

The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700.

In this wide-ranging study Stephen Foster explores Puritanism in England and America from its roots in the Elizabethan era to the end of the seventeenth century. Focusing on Puritanism as a cultural and political phenomenon as well as a religious movement, Foster addresses parallel developments on both sides of the Atlantic and firmly embeds New England Puritanism within its English context. He provides not only an elaborate critque of current interpretations of Puritan ideology but also an original and insightful portrayal of its dynamism. According to Foster, Puritanism represented a loose and incomplete alliance of progressive Protestants, lay and clerical, aristocratic and humble, who never decided whether they were the vanguard or the remnant. Indeed, in Foster's analysis, changes in New England Puritanism after the first decades of settlement did not indicate secularization and decline but instead were part of a pattern of change, conflict, and accomodation that had begun in England. He views the Puritans' own claims of declension as partisan propositions in an internal controversy as old as the Puritan movement itself. The result of these stresses and adaptations, he argues, was continued vitality in American Puritanism during the second half of the seventeenth century. Foster draws insights from a broad range of souces in England and America, including sermons, diaries, spiritual autobiographies, and colony, town, and court records. Moreover, his presentation of the history of the English and American Puritan movements in tandem brings out the fatal flaws of the former as well as the modest but essential strengths of the latter. |Despite almost four centuries of black independent self-help enterprises, the agency of African Americans in attempting to forge their own economic liberation through business activities and entrepreneurship has remained noticeably absent from the historical record. Juliet Walker's award-winning book is the only source that provides a detailed study of the continuity, diversity, and multiplicity of independent self-help economic activities among African Americans. This new, updated edition divides the original work into two volumes. This first volume covers African American business history through the end of the Civil War and features the first comprehensive account of black business during the Civil War.

The Quest for Purity: Dynamics of Puritan Movements.

The Quest for Purity: Dynamics of Puritan Movements.

A Look at James Milner and His "False Prophecy"

A LOOK AT JAMES MILNER AND HIS "FALSE PROPHECY" Kenneth L. Carroll There is widespread agreement today that the main roots of Quakerism are to be found in the radical Puritan movement of seventeenth century England, although this does not deny that there may have been some contact with cross-channel continental religious movements and ideas.1 Many ofthe unusual religious expressions of early Friends, such as refusing to sing the Davidic psalms, going naked as a sign, and appearing in sackcloth and ashes.2 are best understood when viewed in the light of the religious outlook and practices of seventeenth century Puritanism. This seems to be especially true of James Milner's "false prophecy" and the strange performances of Milner, his wife, and followers late in 1652. What was there about Puritanism that helped prepare the way for Milner's behavior? Radical Puritans, greatly impressed by the large number ofpowerful preachers of their day and believing that the "pouring out of the Spirit" was promised in the last days, felt themselves "spiritually close to the apostles." They believed in the continued indwelling of the Holy Spirit, so that one ofthem was even able to say that "It was brought in that it was the same Spirit that did write the Scriptures . . . I did see, and could not doubt of it, that the very administration was given to me, which was given to the Apostles and Saints ofold."3 Another significant aspect ofthe outlook ofradical Puritan outlook is to be seen in the highly apocalyptic expectations and beliefs which many of them possessed. Drawing heavily upon Daniel and the Revelation of John, they believed that they were living in the "last 1.Cf. Donald F. Durnbaugh, "Baptists and Quakers—Left Wing Puritans?" Quaker History, LXII (1973), pp. 67-82, and James L. Ash, Jr. , "Oh No, It is Not the Scriptures," Quaker History, LXIII (1974). 2.Kenneth L. Carroll, "Sackcloth and Ashes and Other Signs and Wonders," Journal ofFriends Historical Society, LIII (1975), pp. 314-325; "Quaker Attitudes Toward Signs and Wonders," Journal ofFriends Historical Society¦, LIV (1977), pp. 70-84; "Early Quakers and 'Going Naked as a Sign'," Quaker History, LXVII (1978), pp. 69-97; "Singing in the Spirit in Early Quakerism, Quaker History, LXXIII (1984), pp. 1-13. 3 . Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1946), pp. 28-29. 18 A Look At James Milner And His "False Prophecy"19 days," for soon the New Age itself would appear. Very shortly the Day ofJudgment, the Day ofthe Lord, would take place, closing out the Present Age where evil holds sway and ushering in the New Age where God reigns supreme.4 Early Quakers shared the apocalyptic outlook and expectations of radical Puritanism. These beliefs, if anything, were actually heightened among Friends in the early 1650s—for the great burst of religious energy and the groundswell of revelation which came with George Fox in some ways accentuated these apocalyptic leanings, already possessed by many early Quakers who as former Baptists, Seekers, Ranters, and other radical Puritans had been prepared for such an approach.5 Hugh Barbour has noted that these early Friends were very much "at ease with the supernatural and miraculous outlook of the Apocalypse" [of John] and that they "could claim to see some elements of the Christian apocalyptic hope, such as the outpouring ofthe Spirit and the Second Coming ofChrist, fulfilled in their own lives."6 In addition to this powerful apocalyptic outlook which marked early Quakerism, there was also a strongly prophetic air about George Fox and the whole movement which sprang from his religious discoveries and preaching. Radical Puritanismhad emphasized the indwelling of the spirit and had developed the practice of "prophesying ." With Fox andhis fellow Quakers, however, prophecy and prophesying necessarily became much closer to what had been experienced in the early church and among the even earlier Hebrew prophets of the eighth and succeeding centuries B.C. Fox was convinced that he and other Friends were now living in the Spirit of the apostles and ofthe prophets.7 One final factor to be noted, before looking at the Milner episode 4.Ibid. , p. 109. Nuttall notes...

Covenant, Crown, and Commons in Elizabethan Puritanism

Elizabethan puritanism, becoming programmatic, declared its intentions for the church in An Admonition to the Parliament, by John Field and Thomas Wilcox, and in the Second Admonition to the Parliament, both in 1572. The first of those manifestos erected a “true platform of a church reformed” according to “the prescript of God's word” and the examples of the “best reformed churches throughout Christendom.” The second took up what its author called “the hardest point,” namely, to show how reform was to be accomplished—in effect, by persuading queen and parliament to become presbyterian. The admonishers appealed to the power of God's word, the threat of his wrath, and the promise of his reward, presenting the cause of reform as a national case of conscience for the civil authority.Two years earlier, in a bold sermon to the queen, another spokesman for the faction had set forth these same considerations but with a significant difference, for the preacher, Edward Dering, grounded his argument on a theopolitical principle—the principle of covenant—which Protestant extremists (including English and Scottish exiles of the Marian period) had already given a revolutionary twist. This article examines the role of ideas of covenant in the ideological address of sixteenth-century puritanism to crown and commons, prince and people. It finds in the reformers' changing conceptions and applications of covenant a key to the character of the puritan movement and the making of the puritan mind.Though puritans of the Elizabethan era made something of covenant doctrine in their theological writings, they rarely put it to political use, and when they did—when some hardy preacher proposed to constrain the civil magistracy by covenant to do God's will—such efforts boomeranged, endangering both the preacher and his cause.

Robert Crowley: A Tudor Gospelling Poet

Robert Crowley has received only minor mention in the history of English literature, chiefly for editing The Vision of Pierce Plowman, the first printed edition of the medieval satire. But his prolific career as a radical poet deserves closer attention. By turns a pamphleteer, stationer, poet, and clergyman, Crowley cultivated an audience in London's growing middle class and among pious aristocrats for his biblical poetry, theological tracts, anti-Roman Catholic polemics, and editions of Langland's riddling poem, which was written in the archaic dialect of the fourteenth-century midlands. Although he eventually became an adherent of the fledgling Puritan movement that emerged out of the Elizabethan vestiarian controversy, he refused to participate in the attack on poetry and fiction that was often associated with the Puritan faction. Despite his radical Protestant fervour, Crowley wrote as a medieval poet. But instead of simply restating Langland's medieval ideal of the Christian commonwealth, Crowley adapted that ideal to the religious, political, and economic crisis of Edward VI's reign (i547-53). Contrary to our stereotyped view of sixteenth-century taste, Crowley's somewhat oldfashioned prophetic poems and satires were far more popular than the Petrarchan love songs of the courtier poets. Crowley typifies the popular native traditions of the middle sixteenth century, and the conventionality of his verse is valuable to the literary historian because it represents something close to a norm for Edwardian poetry, one of the lesser known areas of Renaissance literature. Crowley's poems provide a relatively objective standard for measuring the accomplishments of the truly major figures who flourished towards the end of the century. With enthusiasm and wit, Crowley turned out a body of verse that, for sheer bulk and variety, is extraordinary at a time when dully prolix theological tomes crowded the bookstalls surrounding St Paul's Cathedral. In An Apologiefor Poetrie (c. 1583), Sir Philip Sidney defined divine poetry as the highest kind of verse:

Josias Nicholls and Religious Radicalism, 1553–1639

One of the more interesting personalities in the puritan party of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was the Kentish minister Josias Nicholls (1553–1639). In The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967) Professor P. Collinson notes Nicholls's importance on a number of occasions, paying particular attention to his tract The Plea of the Innocent (1602), which Collinson sees as exemplifying many of the attitudes and aspirations of the moderate wing of the party. A number of other works also mention Nicholls briefly and record the bare bones of his career, including his opposition to Whitgift in 1584 and his deprivation in 1602. But Nicholls remains a shadowy figure and the full significance of his contribution to the godly cause unclear.