The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism Available to Purchase

This is a fascinating and timely book. It acknowledges right away that words like “Puritan” and “Puritanism” have connotations of strict piety and self‐discipline, even to the point of extremism and bigotry, in everyone's mind. This has come through, in a much subtler and complex way in the historiography and critical interpretation of Puritanism, much of it by historians in England and in the USA. In fact, as Peter Lake notes in the twentieth of the chapters in this Companion, dealing with the historiography of Puritanism, to approach this field at all is “to review the history of early...