Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T14:19:33.581Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Puritan Identities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Peter Lake
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Review Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , January 1984 , pp. 112 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Collinson, P., A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism; the life and letters of ‘Godly Master Dering’, London 1964, 4Google Scholar.

2 C. Haigh, ‘The continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, Past and Present, no. 93 (1981), 37–70. Hill, C., Puritanism and Society in pre-revolutionary England, London 1964, passimGoogle Scholar.

3 Haigh, C., ‘Puritan evangelism in the reign of Elizabeth I’, EHR, xlii (1977), 30–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 It would not be entirely sensible to see this cultural gap simply in terms of the opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism. Dr Haigh has noted the unwillingness of Catholic priests to proselytise amongst the people and their preference for the educated piety of the gentry household. This may have been due not only to the ‘cowardice’ of the priests (Dr Haigh's preferred explanation) but also to the same sort of cultural gap between educated piety and ‘popular religion’ as afflicted Protestant or puritan ministers.

5 Collinson, P., ‘Lectures by combination: structures and characteristics of church life in seventeenth-century England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xlvii (1975), 182–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Magistracy and ministry; a Suffolk miniature’, in Knox, R. Buick (ed.), Reformation, Conformity and Dissent, London 1977, 70–91Google Scholar; ‘A comment: concerning the name Puritan’, this Journal, xxxi (1980), 483–7Google Scholar; idem, The Religion of Protestants, Oxford 1982; Cross, C., The Puritan Earl, London 1966CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tyacke, N. R. N., ‘Arminianism, puritanism and counter-revolution’, in Russell, C. (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War, London 1973Google Scholar.

6 Collinson, P., The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, London 1967Google Scholar.

7 For instance, Laurence Chaderton and William Whitaker, for whom see Lake, P., Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, Cambridge 1982CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim. From Oxford, see John Rainolds, for whom see C. Dent, ‘Protestants in Elizabethan Oxford’, unpublished 1980 Oxford D. Phil, thesis.

8 Davies, K. M., ‘“The sacred condition of equality”. How original were Puritan doctrines of marriage?’, Social History, ii (1977), 563–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Todd, M., ‘Humanists, puritans and the spiritualised household’, Church History, xlix (1980), 18–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Tyacke, ‘Arminianism, puritanism and counter-revolution’. This is not to deny that puritan ministers may have modified the nature of Calvinist orthodoxy in the course of presenting Calvinist doctrine in a way designed to induce such an intense personal commitment and sense of spiritual assurance. For three attempts to describe, albeit in radically different language, what I take to be essentially the same process of adjustment, see Lake, Moderate Puritans, chap. 7; Kendall, R. T., Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, Oxford 1979Google Scholar; and Zaret, D., ‘Ideology and organisation in puritanism’, Archives européennes de sociologie, xii (1980), 96–111Google Scholar.

10 K. M. Davies, ‘“The sacred condition of equality”‘.

11 Jacqueline Levy is working on Lady Brilliana Harley, whose marriage seems to fit such a view. I am grateful to Ms Levy for discussions on this point. It remains true, of course, that female elect saints were supposed to do largely what male elect saints told them to do.

12 Hinde, W., The faithful remonstrance of the holy life and happy death of John Bruen of Bruen Stapleford, London 1640Google Scholar. The Bruen household acted as a centre of godly religion; Bruen led his servants and family in a massed phalanx to church, his servants committed acts of iconoclasm in the parish church and he tried to disrupt and prevent local popular festivals.

13 For different views of the implications of the Antichristian nature of popery see Lake, P., ‘The significance of the Elizabethan identification of the pope as Antichrist’, this Journal, xxxi (1980), 161–78Google Scholar.

14 On Hutton, see my ‘Matthew Hutton; a puritan bishop?’, History, lxiv (1979), 182–204Google Scholar.

15 For Bancroft see well, E. Card, A history of conferences and other proceedings connected with the Book of Common Prayer 1558–1600, Oxford 1840, 191–2Google Scholar. For Howson, see Dent, ‘Elizabethan Protestants’, chap. 8. The ambiguities here are considerable. Howson may have modified his position, but in the ensuing fracas in the university Airay was silenced and even appeared before a committee of the Privy Council. An anti-puritan defence of order remained a sure way to power and preferment, and Howson as vice-chancellor clearly had powerful backers. Once traditional puritan complaints had been raised and authority attacked, even someone as well placed and respectable as Airay became vulnerable. There were clearly things better left unsaid on both sides.

16 Breward, I., The Works of William Perkins, Abingdon 1970Google Scholar.

17 Dr Norman Jones in his 1977 Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, ‘Faith by statute; the politics of religion in the parliament of 1559’, and W. S. Hudson in his The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, Duke University Press 1980, both show how explicitly Protestant that settlement was intended to be from the outset.

18 On the issue of the ‘elect nation’ see Bauckman, R. J., Tudor Apocalypse. Abingdon 1978, 71–3Google Scholar, and Christianson, P., Reformers and Babylon, Toronto 1978CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the effect of such attitudes on assessments of foreign policy and for the importance of the Protestant cause within the inner circles of the regime, see Dr S. L. Adams's important unpublished D. Phil, thesis, ‘The Protestant cause; religious alliance with European Calvinist communities as a political issue in England 1585–1630’, Oxford 1973.1 am grateful to Dr Adams for many discussions on this point.

19 Some idea of the way in which this polarity worked in the localities can be gleaned from Dr D. MacCullorh's recent article on Suffolk. There, a conformist bishop (Freake) was forced to rely for support amongst the gentry on crypto-CathoIics and conservatives, only to be frustrated by the court connections of the emerging puritan clique who came to dominate county government. MacCulloch, D., ‘Catholic and puritan in Elizabethan Suffolk: a county community polarises’, Archiv für Reformationsgesckicte, lxxii (1981), 232–89Google Scholar.

20 Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 243–91. Also see Professor Collinson's Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: the struggle for a Reformed Church, London 1979, and his The Religion of Protestants, Oxford 1982, particularly chap. 2

21 Holmes, Peter, Resistance and Compromise: the political thought of the Elizabethan Catholics, Cambridge 1982, 7Google Scholar.

22 For the revisionist case, see Elton, G. R., ‘Parliament in the sixteenth century: functions and fortunes’, Historical Journal, xxii (1979), 255–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see the seminal article by Graves, Michael, ‘Thomas Norton the parliament man: an Elizabethan M.P., 1559–1581’, Historical Journal, xxiii (1980), 17–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the present context it might be worth noting that neither Norton's links with the council nor his ‘Anglicanism’ were sufficiently strong to keep him out of the Tower on occasions.