A quarter of a century ago, Peter Lake published an essay with a knowing, world-weary title: “Defining Puritanism—Again?” (in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, ed. Francis Bremer [1993], 3–29). Lake is the dedicatee of Hot Protestants, but Michael Winship's illuminating and enjoyable narrative history of transatlantic Puritanism chooses to circumvent the terminological and definitional knots into which historians of the subject have repeatedly got themselves, rather than laboriously attempt to unpick them. Winship's endnotes provide reassurance that he is fully in command of the voluminous and contentious modern scholarship on Puritanism. But in a book written for general readers (though one from which specialists, too, will benefit), Winship wisely decides to offer a fresh descriptive analysis rather than to fight, or map, old historiographical battles. Indeed, though Puritanism may be one of early modernity's most redoubtable –isms, the book is consistently less concerned with abstract principles than with the aspirations and agency of real people—Puritans, individual and collective. Most of the chapters begin with an arresting vignette, and personalized disputes and dilemmas supply the fabric for much of the overall account. Some of these involve familiar clerical luminaries (John Hooper, Roger Williams, Cotton Mather), but Winship's cast of characters is decidedly catholic (in the non-ecclesiastical sense), encompassing, among others, a young goldsmith named John Hull; a troubled Exeter Congregationalist, “Susannah Parr”; and the zealous Native American convert, Waban. Through such stories, Winship charts the flowering, and ultimate failure, of the Puritan impulse for thoroughgoing Reformation, from its origins in the ceremonialist disputes of Edward VI's reign to its social and political marginalization, in both England and America, at the close of the seventeenth century.

The Atlantic dimension to seventeenth-century religious life has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars over the past couple of decades, but it is fair to say that Winship's book is the first properly transatlantic history of the Puritan movement. The account he provides is inevitably in some respects a parallel story, but it is also a comparative and, where possible, an integrated one. Massachusetts served as both an inspiring exemplar and a perilous warning to Puritanism's friends and enemies in England in the 1630s, and in the following decades New England churches regularly intervened in English debates over such matters as fasting and prayer. Many New Englanders served in the New Model Army.

Though it is a point that Winship himself chooses not to labor, the bifocal approach to early seventeenth-century Puritanism enlarges the definitional field of vision. Over many decades, Patrick Collinson's (justly) influential work on English Puritanism helped to anchor the idea that Puritans were those who sought to transform worship and governance from within; they were non-conformists (or semi-conformists) but not separatists; those who left the Church of England had in a sense ceased to be Puritans. The model is, however, complicated by the Congregationalist structures adopted from the outset by Puritans in New England. In the vision they internalized, and sought to export, only individual congregations were genuine churches; in a spiritual or theological sense, the “Church of England” had no real existence. In many ways, the central theme of Winship's book is the protracted, and at times remarkably bitter, struggle for moral and political ascendancy between Congregationalists and Presbyterians—factions contending, as the young minister Adam Martindale wrote in his diary in the 1640s, “like Jacob and Esau struggling in the womb” (129).

One consequence of this focus is that Winship's history of Puritanism has a rather “internalist” feel. Collinson once wrote, in a particularly arresting bon mot, that Puritanism was never really a thing in and of itself, but was “only one half of a stressful relationship.” (The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries [1988], 143) Winship gives us a fascinating account of the creative stresses to be found within that one half, but has relatively little to say about Puritanism's ongoing forms of engagement with non-Puritan, and anti-Puritan, society (perhaps because, initially at least, little of the latter was to be found in New England). Yet such engagements were surely fundamental and foundational to Puritanism's identity, both ascribed and assumed. Winship's title derives from a 1581 observation by the godly minister Perceval Wiburn, reproduced as the book's epigraph: “the hotter sort of Protestants are called Puritans” (1). This phrase had in fact been used the previous year by the Jesuit Robert Persons, and the word Puritan itself seems to have first appeared in print in a 1565 work by the exile Thomas Stapleton (A Fortresse of the Faith [1565], f. 134v); Catholics are a rather faint presence in Winship's pages, but they were midwives at the birth of English Puritanism, and thereafter haunted both its infant and adult dreams.

The story Winship tells is nonetheless a coherent and compelling one, informed by the right balance of sympathy for and distance from its subjects. Some popular preconceptions will be confirmed. Puritans did indeed despise dancing, as—in the words of the minister John Dod—“all the action is nothing but the profession of an unchaste heart” (64). But in other instances, Puritans appear more complex and interesting than the usual stereotypes suggest. They were, for example, ambivalent (and divided) about the licitness of card playing, games of chance being be definition ungodly, but games of skill being permissible in the eyes of the Lord. I was surprised to learn, though perhaps I should not have been, that in 1641 Puritan Massachusetts passed the first ever law against animal cruelty. Meanwhile, general readers (and some scholarly ones) are very properly reminded that “the Reformation had been about religious liberty only insofar as that meant the liberty to follow God's law correctly” (3).

The book ends in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, when it became clear that there were to be no significant changes to the Anglican Restoration Settlement, or moves to restore the earlier autonomy of godly Massachusetts. Some readers (including this one) might have welcomed a conclusion or epilogue, reflecting on the longer-term legacies of Puritanism in its transatlantic setting. Still, it is perhaps salutary for American readers in particular to be told that John Winthrop's ”City Upon a Hill” speech of 1630 (perhaps never delivered, and for centuries completely forgotten) was quite narrowly about Massachusetts as a pattern for future New England colonies, and cannot supply “an ancient Puritan explanation for the United States's interventionist, beacon-to-the-world exceptionalism” (81).