Readers seeking a comprehensive history of the Leiden years of the “Pilgrims” need look no further than this nine-hundred-page book by Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs. As director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, Bangs is particularly well positioned to reconstruct the experiences of the future Plymouth colonists during their intermediate stop in the Netherlands and to assess the continuing implications of those experiences during the Pilgrims' first decade in New England.

Strangers and Pilgrims is organized both thematically and chronologically. Bangs begins with a chronicle of the Pilgrims' separation from the Church of England, their flight to Amsterdam, and their subsequent removal to Leiden. He concludes with an account of the conditions that prompted their decision to migrate to North America and a summation of “The Influence of the Leiden Experience on Plymouth Plantation.”

Between these chronologically oriented sections lies a total history of the Leiden years that features extensive descriptions of, among others, economic conditions, architectural designs, and theological disputes. These thematic chapters are also intended to illuminate the subsequent Plymouth experience. Bangs allots twenty pages, for instance, to a detailed narrative of the Dutch-Spanish battles of the first decade of the seventeenth century, in which Myles Standish likely participated. These battles serve as context for a five-page description of military fortifications that Standish likely would have observed and that later informed his presumed participation in planning the fort town of Plymouth in New England. Similarly, Bangs's exhaustive research of Leiden civic archives, seventeenth-century art, and other primary and secondary sources forms the basis of his fifty-page description of several dozen Leiden houses occupied by Pilgrims in the 1610s. This extensive chapter, in turn, provides the necessary background for Bangs's comparatively brief argument, some three hundred pages later, that Plymouth's architecture drew on practices and precedents from Leiden rather than England. “Myles Standish's experience in the Dutch army,” Bangs concludes, “provides a plausible explanation for the design anomalies of Plymouth Colony's early architecture” (201, cf. 677).

Throughout these chapters, Bangs is keen to contest what he views as common misconceptions about the Plymouth colonists (many of them a century old but nonetheless current) repeated and seemingly validated within the historiography of early New England. The title of the book signifies Bangs's rejection of the claim, originating in George F. Willison's Saints and Strangers (1912), that both the Mayflower and Plymouth colony were beset by a class conflict between the Pilgrim “saints” from Leiden and the adventurers from England whom Willison called “strangers.” Willison further claimed that the Pilgrims had formed a minority aboard the Mayflower. Bangs's archival evidence from the Netherlands, on the contrary, reveals not only that the Pilgrims formed a majority aboard the Mayflower but also that several prominent “strangers” in Willison's account were, in fact, members of the Leiden congregation (614; 277–301).

Bangs argues, in addition, that the published accounts of Pilgrims by William Bradford, Thomas Cushman, and Edward Winslow discount a host of popular misconceptions. The Pilgrims, insists Bangs, did indeed celebrate “Thanksgiving” in 1621 and ate Turkey at that feast. They treated the Indians fairly, respecting their land claims and grave sites. They were not “unimportant” in New England, as their ecclesiology influenced the political philosophy of Plymouth as well as the church polity of the earliest Massachusetts Bay towns to the north.

At times, however, and especially in two long chapters on the Dutch religious conflicts in Leiden, Bangs's desire to take sides in historiographical debates dilutes the book's focus on the Pilgrims. In “Assaults on Toleration,” Bangs laments that the “tolerant discussion” advocated by the (Arminian) Remonstrant faction ultimately lost out to the Contra-Remonstrant faction that, for Bangs, was characterized by “obligatory adherence to a rigid interpretation of Theodor Beza's reduction of Calvinism as elaborated by [Franciscus] Gomarus and his friends” (469). The Pilgrims make an appearance in the closing pages of the chapter, and the implication is that the preceding material forms the context for Pilgrim minister John Robinson's debate with the Remonstrant Simon Episcopius, though the precise date and content of the debate remain elusive. The majority of the subsequent chapter on “Dutch Separatism,” similarly, appears primarily concerned to argue that the Contra-Remonstrant (anti-Arminian) factions in The Hague and a few other cities created “a total schism from the established Reformed Church” (526). Bangs here erases the useful distinction between schism and secession, just as elsewhere he collapses heterodoxy into heresy (473). The direct relevance of these debates for the Pilgrims at Leiden is limited, though once the debates were settled (in favor of the Contra-Remonstrants) at the Synod of Dordrecht (1618–19), Dutch authorities moved to suppress engines of dissent such as conventicles and printing presses. The Pilgrims felt increasingly uneasy in Leiden and began considering emigration to North America. The background context for this decision need not have consumed one hundred seven pages, though Bangs's attention to the pressure exerted on the Dutch government by King James I of England is illuminating.

Regrettably, the extensive space given to these internal debates inhibits a more sustained analysis of the impact of the Leiden experience on the Pilgrims. In the final chapter, Bangs acknowledges that the length of the book prevents him from offering “the required revision of the further story” of Plymouth Plantation (677). Admittedly, Bangs's primary objective, pace the book's subtitle, is to elucidate the Pilgrims' experience in Leiden. Few historians, however, can analyze authoritatively the significance of the Leiden years for the Plymouth years. For this reader, it is disappointing that Bangs chose to devote so much space to context and comparatively little to the analysis that he is uniquely positioned to offer. Nonetheless, the book will remain an indispensable resource for historians and antiquarians of the Plymouth founders.