This chapter defines Andrewes’ position in terms of its opposition to a body of both religious and political opinion labelled puritan. While Andrewes’ anti-puritanism is shown to have been rooted in traditional conformist concerns about conformity and church government, it also, Hooker-like, encompassed wider issues of religious style and modes of being. Crucial here was what Andrewes identified and excoriated as the puritan cult of the sermon and view of faith centred solely on knowledge rather than practice or works. According to Andrewes, the result was hypocrisy on a heroic pharisaical scale and a histrionic, wholly performative, style of both preaching and piety.

The chapter analyses the Laudian critique of puritanism as politically subversive of both monarchical and episcopal authority. Puritanism was portrayed by the Laudians as an ideology organised around ‘popularity’. This word denoted two things: firstly, the search for popular approval and applause, to be gained by a rabble-rousing espousal of singularity and an unprincipled criticism of those in power in church and state, and secondly, institutional arrangements – in the church, presbyterianism, and, in the state, an enhanced role for parliament – that subjected the rulers to the whims and opinions of the people. The organising trope was the puritan as a firebrand or incendiary, or alternatively as a malcontent tribuni plebis, with frequent either glancing or direct references being made to the so-called puritan triumvirs, Burton, Bastwick and Prynne.

This chapter looks at Andrewes’ political theology, that is to say his vision of divine right monarchy and the absolute powers of the prince over both church and state; notions that are placed in the overarching structures of his theological position. In the process, the populist principles of the Jesuits and the presbyterians are revealed, in Andrewes’ view, equally and equivalently anti-monarchical in their effects. Andrewes held the injunctions to fear God and to fear the king to be equally compelling and mutually reinforcing injunctions: loyalty to the prince being just another facet of faith in and obedience to God.

This chapter homes in on the explicitly political, and allegedly anti-monarchical, effects of puritan error. Here what Andrewes presents as the integral connections between puritan presumption, hypocrisy and popularity – the latter defined as an obsession with getting and keeping the good opinion of the people, if necessary by defaming their rulers from the pulpit and in the press. Puritanism is thus presented as wholly inimical to monarchical authority in the state and episcopal authority in the church. Again, Andrewes is shown asserting the broad equivalence of the seditious doctrines and practices of the puritans and the papists. He placed special stress on the predestinarian roots of puritan hypocrisy and presumption and hence on the political consequences of what Andrewes took to be (typically puritan) predestinarian error.

This chapter examines the sociopolitical history of the ‘euharmonic organ’, built by Henry Liston in 1817 for St Andrew’s, the first Presbyterian Church in India. Liston’s unique organ was adapted for performance of church music and common-practice repertory in a ‘natural tuning’, optimizing perfect consonance over practicality. Drawing on the arguments of political historian Timothy Mitchell, I argue that this unusual design feature was intended to afford sensations of musical space and time as organized in accordance with the topological and chronological propositions of colonial modernity. The first section investigates how the instrument’s purchase, contrary to the church’s prior rejection of organ music, altered how it construed the relation between reason and sensation, and why those changes were tolerated as necessary for establishing the Anglo-Indian Presbytery as equally progressive and modern to the Anglican Church of India. The second section draws on Liston’s musical historiography in addressing how the instrument was also envisioned as consistent with the church’s programs for ‘native education’. In an afterword, I reflect on the instability of the church’s musicological claims, by showing how Indian theorists successfully inverted what natural tuning represented in order to support claims that musical modernity originated in Hindustan, not Europe.

Chapter 5 gives a detailed account of the trial and execution of Thomas Aikenhead in Edinburgh in 1696–7. The statements that Aikenhead was accused of making are itemised, and their incendiary and openly blasphemous quality is clear. It is also noteworthy that he made such statements in public and seemed reluctant to retract them. This explains the harsh penalty to which he was subjected, which was the subject of much comment at the time. The case also attracted interest in England, not least from John Locke, who preserved various key documents relating to it. Here, Aikenhead’s sources are investigated, including the dangerous books to which he had access in the university library and elsewhere, and his ingenuity in constructing an irreligious ‘system’ from them is asserted.

Chapter 6 provides the background to Archibald Pitcairne’s overtly atheist treatise, Pitcairneana, which is published in full in Chapter 7. It surveys Pitcairne’s career, including his meeting with Isaac Newton in 1692, his medical practice and influence, his passionate Episcopalianism and Jacobitism and his hostility to Presbyterianism, his circle of friends, his library and reading, and his Latin versification. Particular attention is given to his religious views, including the heterodox tract that he circulated in print, Epistola Archimedis, which voiced a deeply subversive view of Christian doctrine, and to Pitcairneana, of which the history of the manuscript and its content is given careful scrutiny.

While the Cromwellian ecclesiastical establishment has often been portrayed in negative terms as the absence of a national church, Chapter 10 supports the case for seeing this establishment in many practical respects (and in the eyes of many serving ministers) as a continuation of the pre-war national church. The chapter discusses how many aspects of the Church settlement were conceptualized and organized at a national level, and the sustained pressure for religious uniformity. A further section discusses the ‘half-life’ of the reforms of the 1640s – an existing Reformation that lurked constantly in the background in this decade, its formularies reprinted and in some cases still deployed. The chapter also seeks to capture something of the Cromwellian church on the ground, where gathered and parochial church forms existed rather awkwardly side by side, where local practice was marked by creativity and improvisation, and where the ritual life of parishes was not as attenuated and token as is sometimes suggested. A final section explores how far the reformers of the 1650s -- and even its most radical spirits -- still situated their positions with reference to the past history of the Church of England and some of its famous figures.

Chapter 12 challenges the assumption that the ‘Restoration church’ inevitably accompanied the political restoration. It begins by charting the different attempted reformations of 1659-60, from radical Congregationalist proposals to the rapid re-establishment of the 1640s Presbyterian settlement just before the king’s return in 1660. The attempted comprehensive settlements of the following ten months are then carefully analysed with reference to the ‘abortive reformation’ of 1640-41 discussed in Chapter 4, the peace negotiations discussed in Chapter 6, and other past reform initiatives. Analysing the wide range of commentary by puritan divines and more moderate episcopalian writers, it points to elements of possible compromise in areas of doctrine, church government (including the revival of plans for ‘reduced episcopacy’), liturgy and ceremonies, and extemporary prayer, culminating in the remarkable concessions of the Worcester House Declaration of October 1660. Other elements of the abortive reformation of 1640-41 are also observable, such as anti-Laudianism, the robust re-assertion of the Church of England’s links with the foreign Reformed churches, and some notable memorializing of earlier evangelical conformists who had been members of the Williams Committee. It is argued that hindsight has led historians to miss these many continuities with earlier reforming initiatives.

Chapter 9 explores the period 1649-53 as a time when all religious groups were forced to rethink the Church of England and to contemplate significant changes to their religious lives. Beginning with the radical reform programmes of 1649-53, it argues that many of these reforms (such as attacks on lay impropriations and tithes) had been prefigured in pre-war debates or could command more mainstream support, and can be studied in continuity with earlier reforming initiatives rather than as a radical break with the past. The stymieing of the 1640s Presbyterian settlement, and the political troubles of presbyterian royalists, are examined. The chapter discusses the practical and ideological problems that both Presbyterians and episcopalian royalists faced over how far they should adapt their customary forms of worship and administration of communion in the face of the new settlement, and documents their failure to create agreed positions on conformity. The chapter also outlines the negotiations conducted by Charles II and his ministers with the Scottish Covenanters, delineating not a simple capitulation but a series of negotiations involving foreign divines, where forms of reduced episcopacy were still being discussed, but ending with an alliance which drove episcopalian royalists to question the royal supremacy.

Chapter 7 traces the emergence of the Reformation implemented by the parliamentarian side in the Civil War. After noting the ambiguous status of the Westminster Assembly, the chapter analyses the drawing up of the Westminster Confession, the Directory for Public Worship, the Catechisms and the form of Presbyterian church government. In each case, it is argued that these represented more sweeping changes than the limited reforms originally contemplated by Parliament. But in each case, it is also demonstrated that the new formularies reflected many pre-war ideas and forms, while the orthodoxy of the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer was still partly maintained. The reform of church government reflected the continuing determination of Parliament to retain ecclesiastical control. The second half of the chapter describes how these reforms were presented and understood, noting how shared discourses of anti-Laudianism, the covenant, fellowship with the foreign Reformed churches, providentialism, and biblicism both justified the changes but also created a language that could be turned against fellow parliamentarians. It is concluded that, for all the radical changes being contemplated and (partly) implemented, the Westminster Reformation encompassed a mixture of change and continuity with the pre-war church.

Introduction: Walter Scott’s tales of chivalry and adventure inaugurated a masculinized Scottish romance tradition that celebrated a sublime and heroic version of Scotland. Nineteenth-century Scotswomen responded to Scott’s influence by establishing a countertradition of unromantic or even antiromantic representations of Scotland. Their novels challenge the long-standing claim that Scotland lacked any equivalent to the English realist novel. In turning from the past to the present and from the sublimity of Scott’s Highland landscapes to farmhouses, factories, and suburban villas, Scottish women writers brought romance to everyday life, illuminating the magnificence of the mundane. Drawing on the evangelical discourses emerging from the splintering of the Presbyterian Church in 1843, they represented fiction as a form of spiritual comfort, an antidote to the dreary monotony and petty frustrations of daily existence.

CH 5: The novels of O. Douglas (Anna Buchan) have been overlooked by scholars because of their apparent artlessness and simplicity. By contrast, those of her contemporary Catherine Carswell are celebrated as examples of Scottish literary modernism. Yet Douglas’s and Carswell’s novels are not in fact as different as their disparate reception might lead us to expect. They challenge Free Church ambivalence toward the indulgence of aesthetic pleasure by representing everyday beauty as a source of happiness and of moral and intellectual amelioration. When Douglas’s characters learn to appreciate and create instances of everyday beauty, they become reconciled to the ordinariness of middle-class, evangelical Scottish society, which they realize is not so ordinary after all. In Carswell’s novels, the appreciation of everyday beauty becomes the modernist epiphany, a moment in which the everyday is transformed and the confines of middle-class, evangelical Scottish society are left behind. Reading Carswell’s novels together with Douglas’s suggests that it is perhaps more useful to conceive of the middlebrow and modernism, or popular literature and high art, as a continuum than as an opposition.

Chapter four turns to Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery. New Thought offered Montgomery an escape from the rigid Presbyterianism of her rural Prince Edward Island community and helped assuage her chronic depression and insomnia. Ultimately, New Thought was not enough to save the author, who committed suicide in 1942. But New Thought pervades her fiction, particularly Anne of Green Gables (1908), which features an inspired girl child in the New Thought mold.Anne Shirley’s revitalizing influence on her adoptive parents, her healing of a dying baby, and her transformative imagination all signal her conformity to this role. So do her homosocial relationships with female “kindred spirits” like her “bosom friend,” Diana Barry. Close relationships between women were a common feature of New Thought novels, which appealed to lesbian and bisexual readers and women seeking escape from oppressive marriages. The conclusion of this chapter turns to Montgomery’s later novel, the adult-themed comedy The Blue Castle (1926), to show that New Thought was more than a passing fancy for the author. Rather, it was a coping strategy that she returned to throughout her life and explored in various genres, from children’s literature to romances for adult readers.

With a focus on Edmund Spenser, this chapter explores representations of ruined monasteries within (New) English protestant writing of c.1590-1642. Monastic ruins are visible mnemonics of British-Irish reformation, and Protestants express surprisingly broad motivations for their remembrance, from sorrow for, to celebration of, monastic dissolution – a breadth of opinion reflecting the breadth of beliefs and practices within the Elizabethan/early Stuart church. Recognition of this confessional latitude is leading to reappraisal of Spenser’s own ‘puritan’ credentials, and to realisation that Spenser was as anti-Presbyterian as he was anti-Catholic. The chapter is the first to translate Spenser’s Presbyterian anxieties to a Scottish context, arguing that Spenser’s famously fractious relationship with James VI was prompted as much by Spenser’s anxieties over James’s seeming support for Scottish Presbyterians as by Spenser’s attack on James’s Catholic mother. The chapter shows how, in Faerie Queene VI, Spenser evokes memories of monastic ruins to warn his generation against the prospect of further, Presbyterian-led ruination in England and Ireland under a future Scottish king. This perspective on monastic ruins – as memories of past, and monitories against future, reformation – serves as a salutary reminder that ‘reformation’ was a protracted and by no means universally popular process for Spenser’s generation.

To understand what puritans were doing in New England, we have to begin elsewhere, for the place of New England is itself not a beginning but a consequence – an effect of causes long in process before there ever were colonists at Plymouth, Salem, or Boston. Puritanism originated many decades before as a movement for reform of worship and the church in Scotland and England, a movement committed to a certain understanding of redemption – the passage from sin to salvation in the Christian life – that had wide-ranging social, political, and theological ramifications. This chapter maps the basic features of that movement and carries the dynamics forward into the “puritan revolution” of c. 1640–1660, including the theological currents that swirled beyond 1660. Tracking how Calvinist ideas circulated from the Continent to England and Scotland and what impact those ideas had on society, this chapter spells out the origins of puritanism and describes the battles and transatlantic dynamics that shaped American puritan literature.