What is a Puritan? Flashcards
How did the term “Puritan emerge”?
Perhaps very first use in Catholic pamphlets, 1565 and 1566
1565: Stapleton in passing alludes to the “Puritans of our country”
1566: John Martial in a defencce of the cross : ‘whote [hot] Puritanes of the new clergie’ and ‘a plaine, puritaine, and notorious protestant’
1567: John Stowe : referring Anabaptists of London : who cawlyd themselves Puritans or Unspottyd Lambs of the Lord’.
Their critics see them as ‘precise men’, ‘our owne Preachers in England, of the Disciplinarian consort’, ‘our English Genevians’, ‘our English Disciplinarians’, ‘our pretended English reformers’. Puritans are commonly accused of calling themselves : “unspotted congregation”; “purest”, “cleanest” and thus seen as ‘vain glorious men’.
Their tendency towards separating themselves from the rest of the Church and community is also highlighted when they are accused of being “factious”, “Brownyngs/ Brownists” and ‘schismatics’.
Connotations of the term ‘Puritan’
schismatic groups which had separated from the Church : novatians ( 3rd century); Donatists (3rd century);
heretics with claims to purity such as Cathares (katharos= pur); Albigenses/ Albigensians
other dangerous heretics: Arians ( 4th century : denied that the Son and Spirit were of equal status with the Father) Anabaptist (16th cent. Siege of Münster)
Main opponent of the Puritans in the 1580s-1590s who refers to them as “precisians”.
In his notorious sermon preached at Paul’s Cross in February 1588 […]‘schismatics’, ‘those of the new humour’, ‘the factious of our age’, ‘our new reformers’, ‘our new men’. In A survey of the Pretended Holy Discipline : he denounced them as “presbyterial” Collinson, p. 21
Richard Bancroft
Collinson on plosives and their use in invectives
the ‘paraperopandectical doctor’ in Thomas Middleton’s play The Family of Love was noted for ‘his precise, Puritanical, and peculiar punk, his potecary’s drug’.” (p. 21)
Source: Collinson, Patrick. «Antipuritanism». The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. Ed. John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008.
What do Puritans call themselves ?
godly, professors of truth, true protestants, professors of the gospel, professors
Nehemiah Wallington: holy people of the Lord; dear children of the most high God; god’s saints and servants; holy and faithful ministers, true Christians
What language should be used to talk about Puritans and puritanism?
This is a very old problem : John Ley, A discourse concerning Puritan:
Tending to Vindication of those who unjustly suffer by the mistake abuse and misapplication of that name, 1641: “[anti-puritans] accuse all good men for precisians, and all precise men for puritans, and all puritans for the only firebrands of the world”.
The term Puritan was criticized and rejected by some historians in the 1960s-1970s ( ex. from Durston and Eales, Introduction, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700)p. 1-2
Christopher Hill commented in the 1950s that the word was ‘a dragon in the path of every student of this period’, and a few years later he described it as ‘an admirable refuge from clarity of thought’ (1956 & 1964)
Basil Hall remarked that it was ‘originally a useful coin of some value’ which had ‘become overminted and ended in headlong inflation’ (1965)
C. H. George: an analytical concept which obscures the realities and significance of differences of ideas, ideals, programmes and class affinities is a bad concept. Puritanism is such a concept and should be abandoned (1968)
Patrick Collinson has likened it to ‘a debate conducted among a group of blindfolded scholars in a darkened room about the shape and other attributes of the elephant sharing the room with them’ (1980)
The merits of term ‘Puritan’
“I believe that the word Puritan remains and indispensable to the description and analysis of this state of affairs (i.e. early modern social conflict at the parish level), and I shall no longer attempt to avoid it. I shall use Puritan and (less frequently) puritanism in subsequent pages to denote the aggressive, reformative and hence socially disruptive aspects of zealous Protestantism.
Puritan, as I understand the term, implies a will to impose certain standards upon society as a whole.
Puritanism entails hostility to the traditional culture as well as enthusiasm for sermons and predestinarian theology.
A man of irreproachable personal piety who nevertheless has no objection to his neighbors’ boozing on the Sabbath or fornicating in the haylofts is not a Puritan.
A puritan who minds his own business is a contradiction in terms”. W. Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of the Revolution in an English County, 1983, p. 146)
Naming non-puritans
“Non-Puritans” initially referred to those who were
(1) satisfied with the Elizabethan settlement
(2) who attended Book of Common Prayer services and
(3) adhered to the keeping of the liturgy as it was.
How did Puritans name non-Puritans?
Puritans called them: “ungodly”; “carnal men”; “atheists”;
William Perkins: the multitude, our common sort of Protestant ; the common people (Haigh 2004)
George Clifford, A briefe discourse of Certaine Points of the Religion whiche is Among the Common Sort of Christians: Which may be Termed the … (1582) and Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Pathway to Heaven (1601) mocked them for being:
ignorant (rural) folk who more or less believe that neighborliness and charity are more important than religious rectitude and that such attitudes would get them into heaven (= good works).
Historians called them “Anglicans” (until 1970s) but this term is for the most part rejected as teleological and retrospectively projecting a reality that only emerged in the 1650s.
Conformists
Non-puritans are now called “conformists”;
When viewed negatively “parish Anglicans” (C. Haigh, The English Reformations 1993);
When viewed positively “Prayer Book Protestants” ( Judith Maltby, Prayerbook and People in Early Modern England, 1998).
Other terms can also be used:
High Church men, churchmen, mainstream Protestants, conformable Protestant, mainstream conformist and Calvinist conformist.
In the last few years, historians have started to work on such figures as John Prideaux and Daniel Featley, referring to them as “reformed conformists” or “Calvinist conformists”
cf Hampton, Stephen. Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church. Oxford : Oxford UP, 2021
Salazar, Greg. Calvinist Conformity in Post-Reformation England: The Theology and Career of Daniel Featley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2022.
Which people rarely attended church?
There is a historiographical discussion about this group : Keith Thomas and C. Hill have hypothethized that a significant portion of the population, and especially among the poorer sort skipped church. R. Marchant’s study of the diocese of York has estimated that there might be 15% of people who did not attend and even formed a subculture of “ethical disssenters” who basically rejected religious values, discipline and conventional morality.
Recent work is a bit more skeptical of the existence of a vast group of irreverent English subjects and have focused on the generational divide : there was a subcultre of disorderly youth (Paul Griffiths and Martin Ingram)
The group who started defending the status quo as a positive good, arguing that the structure of the church was god-given/ divinely ordained (1580s forward); they started moving away from belief in predestination (1590s forward)
Anglicans/Anti-Calvinists/Laudians
They also used to be called Anglicans and are now referred to mainly as “Anti-Calvinists” (1590s-1620s) and “Laudians” (1620s forward)
In reference to Richard Hooker, who defended the CofE as “divinely ordained,” and Lancelot Andrews, who pursued the same agenda, provides a link between Hooker and Laud. So, Peter Lake and Nicholas Tyacke have started using “avant-garde conformists (1580s and 1590s).
Stereotype and reality: to what extent does Puritanism exist ?
Collinson in his most “nominalist” moments has argued that Puritanism was created by polemic in the 1590s in the aftermath of the MarPrelate controversy. Collinson has retreated somewhat from this more radical position but still sees Puritanism as something that exists chiefly in the eye of the beholder.
Debate on Gifford’s dialogues : to what extent are the characters described in the text related to “reality”?
Haigh has used these categories of Gifford and Dent ( A Plain Man’s pathway to Heaven) to explore the archives and identified many of these “characters” in church court records. (See « The Character of an Antipuritan ». The Sixteenth Century Journal 35.3 (2004) 671-688) + The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven : Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570-1640. Oxford UP, 2007.
Why do historians agree that there is such a thing as a “Puritan”?
1) For a caricature to work it needs to be related to a recognizable reality.
2) Puritans are referred to in multiple and very diverse sources, not only theater and polemic (cf Haigh mentioned above)
3) The godly identified themselves as a group which was distinct from the rest.
“This book, then, works with a definition of puritanism as that which puritans saw in each other. It recognizes that the term puritan was dynamic, changing in response to the world around it and applying to several denominations; but it also claims that the term denotes a cluster of ideas, attitudes and habits, all built upon the experience of
justification, election and regeneration […]
Puritans exhibited a ‘style of piety, a mode of behaviour; a set of priorities, which contemporaries were capable of recognizing when they say them’ (qu.Peter Lake). The idea that the puritans could recognize each other as brethren is fundamental to this book. I want to show how they recognized each other”
Spurr, English Puritanism, 1998, p. 7-8.
“…while it is undoubtedly true that much separated these men, they nonetheless shared something very important that justifies grouping them together under the label puritan, namely a common spiritual and cultural outlook. Above all else, puritanism was a movement grounded in a highly distinctive
cast of mind – or to use a more fashionable term, mentalité – which displayed itself in the individual puritan as a peculiarly severe yet vibrant spirituality, and within groups of puritans as a unique and dynamic religious culture. For this reason, we would argue that it is through the study of this culture that puritanism is most fruitfully approached, and that it is around those who shared in it that the boundaries of the movement should be drawn.” (Durston & Eales, “Introduction: The Puritan Ethos”, p. 9)
Stripped of its pejorative rhetoric, there was a remarkable fit between the characteristics attributed to the godly by Laudian anti-Puritans and the distinctive forms of Puritan voluntary religion described in Clarke’s lives and analyzed by Pr. Collinson and others. Viewed both from inside and outside, then, there was considerable agreement about what
Puritan godliness looked like, accompanied, of course, by complete disagreement about what it meant.
P. Lake, « Defining Puritanism, again », Puritanism: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, Francis Bremer (ed.). 1993. P. 21-22
From the inside, Puritans are about as factious and subversive as the homily of obedience. From the outside looking in,
From a Laudian viewpoint, they represent a sinister threat to order and obedience.
Agreement about what constituted the defining marks of the godly “provides telling evidence of the existence of a stable entity, style or position which we can legitimately call PN. On the other, the very different versions of what it meant serve as a crucial index of just how divisive that Pn style could be” (p. 22)
The best way of thinking of Puritanism is as a reality shaped through confrontation with anti-Puritanism. Both realities are brought into existence dialogically (through dialogue/controversy) and dialectically (they evolve through confrontation and escalation; the one shaping the other).
Reversing Collinson’s position, Lake argues that Puritan ideas about theology, their sense of election, the disruptive effects of their modes of religious expression triggered a reaction which he calls “conformist differentiation” (anti-puritanism) (p.22-26).
He describes the process by which the ideas of each side are shaped as “an almost classically dialectical process” (p. 26). This will be explored in Chapters 3 and 4 of the Lecture.
Calvinists
Puritans as reformed Calvinists
John Calvin
French Protestant who implemented radical Reforms in Geneva.
What beliefs did protestants share?
So BASIc !
- Sola gratia (grace not acts save us)
- Biblicism
- Anti-Catholicism (i.e. rejection of pope + sacramental system as conveying grace)
- Sacrifice of the mass is idolatry
- Iconophobia (much weaker in Lutheran tradition )+rejection of the very idea that objects, places are holy. Only God is holy.
