It is difficult to define the word “Puritan”. This dictionary does not actually include a formal definition of its subject – jumping straight from William Prynne to the Putney Debates. I would consider Puritanism an attitude of mind rather than an aspect of any particular religion: an earnest desire to return to some previous, probably mythical, time of religious uniformity, an inbuilt assumption of superior knowledge entitling the holder to over‐ride his neighbours' opinions, and, most especially, an active dislike of earthly enjoyments. Macaulay defined the puritan as “one who hated bear‐baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators”. Mencken similarly saw Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”. Thus I would have included the Wahabi Muslims (who have become quite as disruptive a force in the body politic as their sixteenth and seventeenth century English predecessors), some similar Jewish movements, and even some intensely puritanical atheists, mostly found lurking on the more aggressive fringes of the green movement. This dictionary, the 79th in an extraordinary series from Scarecrow Press, is concerned with a far narrower topic: the English religious movement that began in the late 1550s in reaction to Queen Mary's persecutions, finally brought to a close by the Act of Toleration of 1689, and, the closely related authoritarian movement brought to New England by English asylum seekers from the 1620s onwards, which was finally absorbed into wider American society by about 1750.
This narrow focus makes it difficult to get an overview of Anglo‐American Puritanism, as it under‐represents the movement's European origins. There are entries for Calvinism and Arminianism and for the Synod of Dort, but not enough to emphasise the extent to which the leading figures developed their ideas through direct involvement with Calvin's extraordinary experiment in theocracy. Entries for figures such as Zwingli and Grotius and some account of Geneva under Calvin would have helped give a broader picture. What we get is biographical details of some hundreds of leading figures in British and American religious history, interspersed with short entries for events and institutions from the period. Much of this information is widely available elsewhere – in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for example, or in Brook's much reprinted Lives of the Puritans (Brook, 1994). Nevertheless, it is useful for historians to have it collected together in this way. The century between the defeat of the Armada and William IV's Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a crucial period in the founding of modern Britain, and the period between the voyage of the Mayflower and the revocation of the first Massachusetts charter in 1684 still has important resonances in American politics today, so this book covers topics of wide historical interest.
The dictionary format is clumsy and inevitably leads to some duplication – having an entry for Lodowicke Muggleton immediately followed by an entry for the Muggletonians with some of the content repeated is wasteful. The cross‐referencing is occasionally clumsy. There are boldface references in various entries to The Earl of Essex for example, but under Essex we find Earl of see Devereux, Robert. Nevertheless it is all in here. I cannot think of any major English or American figure from the period who is not represented, or any major politico‐religious occurrence not adequately summarised. The dictionary proper is supplemented by a chronology, a too brief introduction (a longer, broader overview would have made this book a better companion to the subject) and a useful, very well‐organized bibliography with a brief discussion of relevant websites. I would personally hesitate to recommend Wikipedia as a source of information on any religious topic, and I would like to have seen web links in the actual body of the bibliography – as is the way with religions, much of the primary material is now out there for free, but still, as a bibliographical guide this is excellent. Public libraries will probably face more of a demand for broader historical textbooks but might consider this as a useful reference backup. Although theological libraries are the obvious market for this book, academic libraries catering for courses in English or American history should also seriously consider acquiring it as a basic reference source. I would still recommend Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, now freely available via the web (see www.thedevilsdictionary.com/), as the best anti‐puritan reference book though.
