In a chapter on “Puritan Legacies” in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, editor John Coffey notes that long after the passing of the Puritan movement, generations of both religious folk and scholars continue to be persuaded that “Puritanism matters” (340). For these spiritual and the academic students of Puritanism, Coffey and his co-editor, Paul C. H. Lim, have compiled a reference work of exceptional scope and balance.

The design of the book is admirable. It begins with five chronological chapters on the development of English Puritanism, including Patrick Collinson on “Antipuritanism” and John Morrill on “The Puritan Revolution.” The next section moves beyond England to chart the movement's history in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, New England, and Europe, with chapters contributed by David D. Hall and Margo Todd. The text then proceeds to eight thematic chapters that include David Como on radical Puritanism, Alexandra Walsham on popular culture, and Ann Hughes on Puritanism and gender. Peter Lake concludes the volume with a lucid historiography. I have taken time to rehearse the table of contents in order to stress two principal points. First, this cohesive set of essays introduces the history of Puritanism and alternative perspectives on the movement in a manner that will give university students—the main audience of the Cambridge Companion series—a thorough foundation for their own studies. Furthermore, by effectively situating Puritanism in its distinctive national and colonial settings, the volume encourages students to adopt a transatlantic and British perspective rather than focusing solely either on England or colonial North America. Second, as suggested by the names I have listed, Coffey and Lim have assembled a group of authors who are truly the leading scholars of Puritanism over the past half century. Even without Lake's concluding historiographic essay, the reader quickly gains a sense of the development of scholarly interpretation of Puritanism from Max Weber to the current major voices in the field. In particular, both the text and the footnotes testify to the immense scholarly debt owed to Patrick Collinson and, especially, to his classic study of 1967, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press).

All this is to the good. But, for this reader at least, some ambiguity remains around the issue of why “Puritanism matters” for contemporary students and scholars. Beyond its superb summation of a twentieth-century field of scholarship, does The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism also suggest important new directions for research—directions that “matter”? As several of the contributors observe, much of the energy for the study of Puritanism down through the 1970s derived from the idea that Puritanism played a pivotal role in the emergence of the modern world or the modern national identities of England and the United States. R. H. Tawney, Christopher Hill, Perry Miller, and Sacvan Bercovitch inspired two full generations of research in no small measure because they argued, in various ways, that some understanding of the Puritan movement was constitutive to an understanding of modernity. The contributing authors have, for solid historical reasons, backed away from these large claims and the causal arguments that these claims implied. But the resultant interpretive modesty leaves the reader unclear why Puritanism “mattered,” either in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or today.

The issue of whether “Puritanism matters” also introduces the closely related problem of what one means by Puritanism. The tendency of earlier interpretations of Puritanism, in which it was the vanguard of religious and political modernity, was to stress, at least tacitly, the internal coherence of a Puritan movement, even when the interpreters emphasized the change and development of that movement. On this matter of defining Puritanism, the present group of authors makes a more clear-cut contribution. From Collinson's opening chapter on “Antipuritanism” to Dewey Wallace's solid essay on doctrinal controversy, the chapters consistently describe Puritanism as constituted less by some internal motive or orientation than by a shifting collection of opposing religious groups and tendencies: Catholics, Separatists, Laudian Arminians, and so on. As Lake puts it, the identities of Puritans and their opponents were mutually constituted through “processes of political manoeuvre and public debate and polemic” (364).

If, in order to understand Puritanism in its various forms and aspects, one must recognize that it was historically constituted by these contingent struggles, oppositions, and networks of affiliation, then one wonders whether the route to historical understanding of Puritanism can ever pass through a Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. Instead, the unspoken advice of this fascinating volume seems to be that Puritanism is better understood not on it own but in the contestations of shifting Christian communities and networks that comprised the wider history of British Christianity in the transatlantic world.