Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700, The

The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700. Edited by Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales. Themes in Focus. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. viii + 332 pp. $45.00 (cloth).

Patrick Collinson is the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University and a leading scholar of English Puritanism. His name does not appear on the cover of this work, but his influence is evident throughout. He contributed the first essay and is often cited bv the other contributors to this collection. Peter Lake even converts Collison's name to an adjectival form. For Lake a "Collinsonian" depiction of Puritanism is of "a form of voluntary religion and ethical rigorism operating on the personal and interpersonal, the domestic and household levels, to supplement and extend . . . the norms and forms of the national church and the wider society" (p. 156).

As that definition might suggest, the chapters of this collection attempt to define and describe Puritanism in social rather than theological terms. In their introduction, editors Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales explain why a social approach is preferable to the theological one taken by such authors as J. F. H. New, J. Sears McGee, Richard Greaves, and Peter White. Durston and Eales argue that theological markers, such as the doctrine of double predestination, are not useful before the mid-1620s because a wide spectrum of Anglicans subscribed to them. It was only when a royal party succeeded in convincing many Anglicans to adopt a high-church Arminian theology that a Reformed theology could be said to be typical of a Puritan remnant. Eales and Durston adopt, therefore, an alternative cultural approach, which they see as consistent with the work of Peter Burke in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. They apply this approach to Puritanism by identify ing the movement "as grounded in a highly distinctive cast of mind-or to use a more fashionable term, mentalite" (p. 9).

In the subsequent chapters, the contributors to this collection describe this mentalite in a variety of ways. Two of the chapters are rather broad in scope. Patrick Collinson's chapter touches upon Puritan opposition to popular festivals, games, and the theater, and their alternative activities of listening to sermons, psalm-singing, and participation in public fasts. Jacqueline Eales describes the network of educational institutions, printed works, political connections, and individual families with with which Puritans kept alive and expanded their movement during the later Elizabethan and early Stuart years.

Other chapters are more specific in their focus. Peter Lake examines literature of the mutual denunciations by Puritans and their opponents and concludes that the identities of the two groups were "dialectically linked." (p. 165) That is to say; the members of each group made use of the other to distance themselves from unwanted logical consequences of the positions that they held. Ralph Houlbrooke traces the contours of the Puritan ars moriendi, which involved neither Holy Communion nor a full confession to a priest, but did place a premium on submission to God's will. Houlbrooke notes the eclipse of the Puritan pattern and the adoption in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer of the patterns of holy dying advocated by Jeremy Taylor that restored both confession and communion for the dying.

Margaret Aston's chapter traces the rise of iconoclasm from the time of Elizabeth through the Commonwealth. The destruction of images was, she suggested, largely a lay activity. It was tolerated, but not encouraged during Elizabeth and James I's years, punished on ground of usurpation of royal prerogative under Charles I, and legitimated by the Parliament during the Commonwealth.

Two chapters deal with the use of law. Martin Ingram's contribution summarizes current research on the church courts between 1560 and 1640. Earlier historians took the denunciations in John Field and Thomas Wilcox's Admonition to the Parliament (1572) as evidence of a general Puritan opposition to church courts. Ingram suggests a more complex picture with Puritans, particularly during the reign of James I, recognizing that church courts could be useful agents for moral and theological reform. Christopher Durston's chapter traces the Puritan abolition of church courts and their attempt to use Parliamentary legislation to impose a Puritan culture on the nation as a whole during the Interregnum. Despite some rather draconian measures, members of Parliament were not able to reform the morals and manners of the nation as a whole to their liking. On the contrary, Durston suggests, the Puritan effort led to increased social unrest and popular antagonism.

John Spurr adds a final chapter that summarizes the transition of the Puritan movement in the 1660s from a position of leadership in the national church to that of an isolated, dissenting minority.

This work suffers from some of the usual defects of a collection of essays. The chapters are uneven in scope. There are variations in style, etc. Yet I found it to be a useful volume, nonetheless. The book avoids the difficult; of seeing Puritanism in simply negative terms. It contains a number of tidbits of information that are surprisingly relevant to contemporary debates in the church. Those interested in inclusive language in worship may be interested, for example, in Margaret Aston's discussion of the Anglican consensus on the inappropriateness of portrayals of the first person of the Trinity as an elderly man. Those seeking to find precedents for Anglican attitudes on public morality may be similarly interested in Christopher Durston's discussion of the Adultery Act of 1650, which imposed the death penalty on offenders.