An innovative and compelling study of puritanism that follows the full sweep of the movement’s history in England and America Begun in the mid-sixteenth century by Protestant nonconformists keen to reform England’s church and society while saving their own souls, the puritan movement was a major catalyst in the great cultural changes that transformed the early modern world. Providing a uniquely broad transatlantic perspective, this groundbreaking volume traces puritanism’s tumultuous history from its initial attempts to reshape the Church of England to its establishment of godly republics in both England and America and its demise at the end of the seventeenth century. Shedding new light on puritans whose impact was far-reaching as well as on those who left only limited traces behind them, Michael Winship delineates puritanism’s triumphs and tribulations and shows how the puritan project of creating reformed churches working closely with intolerant godly governments evolved and broke down over time in response to changing geographical, political, and religious exigencies.
Author
A specialist in the history of religion in colonial America, Michael Winship is professor of history at the University of Georgia, where he holds the E. Merton Coulter Chair. Michael Winship's most recent book is Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and Massachusetts' City on a Hill (Harvard UP, 2012), a Choice Academic Title of the Year for 2012. Previous books include Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (Princeton UP, 2002), The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided (UP of Kansas, 2005) and, with Edward J. Larson, The Constitutional Convention: A Narrative History from the Notes of James Madison (Random House, 2005.) Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America is forthcoming with Yale University Press. Recent articles include ''Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c.1570-1606,'' English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1050-1074; ''Algernon Sidney's Calvinist Republicanism,'' Journal of British Studies 49 (2010), 753-773; ''Defining Puritanism in Restoration England: Richard Baxter and Others Respond to A Friendly Debate,'' Historical Journal 54 (2011), 689-715; "Straining the Bonds of Puritanism: English Presbyterians and Massachusetts Congregationalists Debate Ecclesiology, 1636–40," in Crawford Gribben, Scott Spurlock, eds. Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600-1800 (Palgrave, 2015), pp. 89-111. A chapter on New England religion from the 1680s-1730s, "Congregationalist Hegemony in New England, from the 1680s to the 1730s," is in the Cambridge History of Religions in America, vol I (New York, 2012), and a chapter on the various early forms of English church establishments in the Americas, '' British America to 1662." is in the Oxford History of Anglicanism, vol. I (Oxford, 2017).
