Most serious historians are still willing to acknowledge that the putatively priggish Puritans were considerably more than the aggregate of these reductionistic caricatures: (1) Jonathan Edwards's hellfire and brimstone sermon encapsulated in the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”; (2) the haunting specter of censoriousness, self-righteousness, and a spectacular display of intolerance to any dissenting voices whether during the Salem witch trials, or during the English Civil War and the ensuing protectorate of Oliver Cromwell; or (3) the well-known dictum of H. L. Mencken: “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Yet, with the increasing significance of “The 1619 Project” and other emerging casting of the vision and version of the world inhabited by the early immigrants to the shores of the “new” world, ranging from the coasts of Plymouth, Massachusetts, to Hampton, Virginia, it seems that David Hall's The Puritans: A Transatlantic History should at least be considered a text around/against which robust conversations on the “original sin” of the American project should be considered. Just exactly, who were the Puritans? Why did they come over to this part of the oceanic and cultural divide? How did the Puritan commitment to a Calvinistic deity manifest itself in their attitude toward and treatment of those who differed from them, both in terms of cult and culture?

Even though Hall could not have envisioned that the political and cultural milieu of the last few years in public life in America needs the “vitality of Puritan-style politics and social ethics at a moment in our national history when democracy is failing and a social ethics of ‘community’ is being jeopardized” (354), it surely becomes a secondary aim for any post-revisionist account of transatlantic Puritanism. Obviously, in Hall's nearly half-century-long career as a preeminent historian of colonial America, he has surely witnessed the rise and fall of different interpretive lenses through which the phenomena of early Americas were viewed, and colonial America's multifarious modus vivendi with Britain as well. Starting with The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (1972); Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989); A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (2011), and now arguably the tour de force of his long publishing career: The Puritans (2019), Hall has been offering fabulous accounts of the way books, ministers, and laypeople were influencing the religious and political cultures around them, and, in turn, were shaped by them.

For the present reviewer, all of Hall's writings were treasure chests, not only of pointing me to bibliographical resources I would otherwise not have found, but—more crucially—of challenging my own paradigms of interpreting the early modern Atlantic world. Yet, of late, I have been, simply by virtue of living in the post–George Floyd era, as well as listening to Propaganda—an American Christian hip hop artist—singing about the “Precious Puritans” and reading Renie Chow Choy's Ancestral Feeling: Postcolonial Thoughts on Western Christian Heritage (London: SCM Press, 2021), my appreciation for Hall's oeuvre grew, though certainly not uncritically.

What follows below, then, is not a critical engagement with what Hall did not say, or failed to engage in his tome, which is already 520 pages long. I will leave that task to someone else. Instead, Hall's Puritans will be assessed by the heroic effort to seek the elusive balance of telling the stories of reformed Protestants in England, Scotland, and New England. As we shall see below, if for nothing else, this alone is worth the price of the book: it gives the readers a deeply engaged interpretation of the Atlantic religio-politico-cultural movement without settling for a simple binaries and easy answers. Hall's narrative is nuanced, complicated, and at times arrives at surprising conclusions.

Chapter One, “From Protestant to Reformed,” amiably charts the course of the voyage. Caught between the radical Anabaptist vision of separation from worldly affairs and the Catholic vision of the co-extensive nature of Church and State, where the former was a sovereign State, tout court, Reformed communities—from Geneva to Edinburgh, from Cambridge (in England) to Cambridge across the seas—wrestled mightily about the complicated nature between Church and State. These stories Hall tells “owe some of their richness and complexity to the ever-present difference—as much a part of our world as theirs—between Christianity as an ideal and Christianity as embodied in an institutional church closely allied with the civil state” (36), and as he, echoing Patrick Collinson's view that Puritanism was always only one-half of a stressful relationship between the Puritans and their anti-Puritan “neighbors,” wrote that the history of this movement with the reformed principles as the impetus was “never free of pressure that worked against” its goals (39).

Chapter Two, “A Movement Emerges,” travels the familiar terrain of the development of the Puritan movement during the reign of Elizabeth I. By setting the stage of confrontation between the radical Puritans who saw the “popish trash” (50) as utterly unworthy of being part of the accoutrement of “Christ's little ones” and their pure communion, Hall leads the readers into the inner world of the theological battles carried out in the political arenas. What is helpful in Hall's treatment of reformed theological ideas is that he does not treat these ideas, whether doctrines of predestination or vestments or Christ's headship of the earthly and heavenly church, as merely epiphenomenal to politics. Instead, Hall takes the theo-political origins and consequences and helps the reader to understand how crucial and explosive some of these ideas were.

Particularly fascinating was Chapter Three, “Reformation in Scotland,” which is often relegated in current historiography as part of a separate narrative—and that for understandable and justifiable reasons—vis-à-vis that of the English version. However, the salutary effect of the juxtaposition of the stories of reform in both Scotland and England is that one could come to a greater understanding of the desires of the Scottish commissioners at the Westminster Assembly who sought to effect a more thorough reforming of Christ's kirk thanhitherto attempted had achieved. Summarizing the conflict between James I and the less monarchically oriented Calvinists under his reign, Hall writes: “Yet a Protestant imaginary that fused kirk, covenant, and anti-Catholicism with a critique of imperial kingship, a synthesis grounded in ‘Calvinist anti-monarchical constitutionalism’ and its appropriation of Old Testament examples of evil kings being overturned, was not going to disappear, for its core elements were preserved in sermons and histories of the church” (108).

In Chapter Four, Hall introduces the theme of “Practical Divinity,” which was an upshot of religious competitions at their best. Both Catholics and Protestants produced their own versions of manuals for greater sanctification and mortification; they often copied and lifted the other's materials with scant recognition of such influence and borrowing. Hall's chapter offers an excellent account of the rise, challenge, and rebirth of this literary genre of English, Scottish, and New England practical divinity. Even though Hall is not as clear and expansive in presenting the challenges of and consequent distinctions from Catholicism, the quest for assurance of faith remained the bane for the Puritan soul, both for the ministers and their parishioners. However, Hall does present the crucial topic of the rise of Arminianism both in the Netherlands and in England as a direct theological and pastoral response to the seemingly elusive nature of assurance within Calvinistic divinity. Furthermore, with a concatenation of “mainstream” puritanism, Arminianism, and Antinomianism as competing and conflicting points on the spectrum of English Protestantism regarding the issue of faith and assurance, Hall offers the readers a very helpful heuristic to situate the terms of controversy.

Chapter Five, “A Reformation of Manners,” was surprisingly short, particularly since this full-court press for externalization of the internal espousal of the ideal of reformed theology had been embraced wholeheartedly by the Puritans in England, Scotland, and New England, and for at least the English contexts, it was arguably the tension arising from this aspect of “Reformation of Manners” that gave rise to the deepening rift between the Puritans and their agitated anti-Puritan co-religionists. Chapter Six, on the other hand, “Royal Policies, Local Alternatives,” was a true gem. By charting the birth, rise, and culmination of dissenting from the Stuarts—James and Charles—Hall shows the rationale for and trajectory of the puritan desiderata. Whether it was royalist absolutism (in various shades of gray) or pushing the Church of England back to the unacceptable option of Romish idolatry, Puritans were assiduously quoting biblical texts to justify their oppositional mode of existence, which ultimately led to the jettisoning of both episcopacy and monarchy, at least temporarily between 1649 and 1660, with the dual execution of Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud (1645) and the regicide of Charles I in January 1649.

Equally compelling is Hall's take on the quest for the “New Sion” in Chapter Seven. Assuredly, there is nothing entirely new in his treatment of the narrative of coming over to the new world, which was largely propelled by the “rebellion” and dissatisfaction with the slow pace of reform between 1625 and 1640. Hall rightly introduces the theme of Puritan apocalypticism as a leading interpretive perspective of expressing their anticipation of and experiences in the last days. Thomas Brightman's Apocalypsis Apocalypseos (1609) was translated into English as A Revelation of the Revelation (1615), which became the lightning rod for many Puritans to think afresh about the mode of episcopal governance as to whether it was in need of a “full and due reformation” of acceptable worship in the sight of God (217). In Hall's memorable turn of phrase, we are told that the suffering embraced by William Prynne, John Bastwick, and Henry Burton—the triumvirate dissenters to the personal reign of Charles I—was interpreted by the spectators of this gruesome scene of cutting off of ears and forehead branding with SL (as in seditious libeler) as the reincarnation of the scenes from Foxe's Book of Martyrs, so that at that moment, “everything Laud and Charles were hoping to accomplish began to unravel. Now, enemies of the state were really God's agents on earth and those in power were ungodly tyrants” (219). With this weaving of the narrative of Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne, the cataclysmic event happening in June 1637 served for Hall as a key precursor of England's troubles that further precipitated migratory patterns for religious and political convictions, thereby connecting the two worlds: Old and New England.

What sets Hall's book apart from others with similar erudition and acuity of analysis is found in the Epilogue entitled, “Legacies.” In the words of Arnold Hunt in his review of The Puritans for the London Times Literary Supplement, there was “something of an elegiac flavour” in it as well, since rather than blame the ills of American civic disorder of racism and capitalism—and other social ills du jour—to Puritanism, Hall offers a counternarrative that it was in the replacing of the best of this reformed Protestant tradition with plain self-fulfillment sans God and sans neighborly ethical responsibility that we might have ended up in the current religio-cultural malaise. Whether one disavows his overall thesis or not, Hall's most recent contribution to the field—however diminishing it might be—of Puritan studies will not be going away any time soon. In fact, if I could predict, it would stand the test of time.