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A Comment: Concerning the Name Puritan*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Patrick Collinson
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Extract

With Professor Christianson, one can only deplore the paucity of books dealing with the history of the Church of England between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War. With the exception of histories covering a somewhat longer time span, there has been no attempt at synthesis since Bishop W. H. Frere's The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1904), which was part of a series answering to a semi-popular and general interest in the Church of England ‘as a factor in the development of national life and character’. It is remarkable and even scandalous that the greatly altered perspectives of twentieth-century historians are not reflected in a more recent and adequate account of the post-Reformation and pre-revolutionary Church. The Jacobean epoch is a particularly neglected subject, to which even Frere devoted no more than 100 of his 400 pages, giving it no particular shape or significance. Jacobean bishops of the calibre of Toby Matthew, James Montague and Thomas Morton were not even mentioned. Today that singular and exemplary figure, Arthur Lake, Laud's predecessor as bishop of Bath and Wells, is totally forgotten. The reason for our myopia is not very flattering to modern historiography. Unlike the Reformation of the Church of England, or the Elizabethan Church, the Jacobean Church was not a subject for Gilbert Burnet or for John Strype, and consequently (or so it seems) it is not a subject for us.

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Articles
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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , October 1980, pp. 483 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 Fuller, Thomas, Church History of Britain, Oxford 1842, ii. 475.Google Scholar

2 Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution’, in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Russell, C., London 1973, 119–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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5 See a collection of recent contributions to our understanding of theological and ecclesiastical relations between the Reformed Church of England and other Reformed Churches , Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c. 1500—c. 1750, Baker, Derek (ed.), Studies in Church History, Subsidia 2, Oxford 1979Google Scholar.

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10 Widdowes, op. cit., Sigs. Ai, B2.

11 The case of the kingdom stated, quoted O.E.D.. sub ‘puritan’.

12 Morrill, J. S., The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War 1630-1650, London 1976, 153.Google Scholar

13 Described 011 the title-page as ‘A Tract necessary and usefull for these Times’.

14 A discourse concerning puritans, 1641, 9.

15 Ibid., 58.