Puritanism is such an intensely Anglo-American field of study that one can spend an entire career in the field without consulting scholarship in another language. Anne Dunan-Page's study of Dissenting church records from the 1640s to 1714 will be an important exception to that trend. Operating with a definition of “puritan” that more or less coincides with the contemporary category of “Independents,” she assembled a base of seventy-two manuscripts to shed light on what it was like to be part of one of twenty-three Calvinist Baptist, seventeen Arminian Baptist, twenty-eight Congregationalist, or four mixed Baptist and Congregationalist churches. In compiling and analyzing this source base, Dunan-Page has created an original and valuable contribution to the study of puritanism and early modern English religious life in general. It provides both a refreshing portrait of these puritans as everyday people plagued by the same foibles as their non-puritan neighbors as well as a thorough account of the spiritual efforts that set them apart.

Although firmly grounded in the Anglo-American scholarship on puritanism, Dunan-Page's interest is in the sort of social and literary studies more typical of scholarship on early modern France. A student of early modern English religion for over two decades, she previously published a book on John Bunyan and has also edited a number of volumes on English and Huguenot religious culture. “Lives and Relations” is an apt characterization of a study that devotes about equal amounts of time to each aspect in twelve chapters divided into four sections. The first section sets the stage, first with a chapter surveying puritan history and historiography, where Dunan-Page displays her familiarity with the scholarship but also refuses to fully side with any specific line of interpretation within it. Taking her inspiration more from historians of popular religion like Christopher Marsh and Robert Orsi, she defines her primary interest as “lived religion” (17) and, in general, restricts herself to the evidence offered by the numerous church records on which her study is based.

As she points out in her second chapter, these church records are a rare, and rarely consulted, source base. Apart from James Cooper's study of Congregationalists in Massachusetts and one dissertation on seventeenth-century England, they have not been the subject of systematic study like their counterparts in Scotland, Holland, and France. The primary reason is no doubt the shoddy, scattered, and haphazard nature of the source base. Created by unofficial, at times clandestine and illegal, gatherings without a nation-wide organization, they lack the reliable form of “church books” that makes the social history of those other Reformed communities easier to recover. They present other problems, too. For example, some accounts only survive in heavily redacted nineteenth-century transcriptions that omit much and reorganize the rest according to priorities the seventeenth-century authors did not have. Nevertheless, Dunan-Page makes a good case that, despite the problems and limits of these sources, their “richness and the number of surviving manuscripts justifies” a thorough modern study (42).

The second section focuses on communal experiences. Three separate chapters explore the founding of the individual churches, their recruitment of new members, and their use of spaces for worship. As she reminds us, Dissenting churches were not tied to a physical church building. Instead, their church was the body of people who gathered together. The act of founding a church was thus a moment of great communal importance, and the accounts of this event often open each church's record. Recruiting and retaining members and pastors, vital to the survival of the church, is her next topic. Finally, these churches had to survive the periodic outbursts of persecution in the Restoration era. By discouraging churches from meeting, persecution produced noticeable gaps in their surviving records, but it could not destroy the churches as long as they were resolved to stick together. A third chapter studies the many different spaces they found to worship in. Drawing on the roughly 4,000 licenses for worship granted during the brief period of Indulgence in 1672, Dunan-Page establishes that domestic spaces in people's homes, not barns or outdoors, were the most common places of resort.

Since these churches did not conform to a parish, its members could at times live a substantial distance apart from each other, posing an additional challenge to communal survival, which is explored, along with other issues, in the fourth section. Keeping a church together took work, these records reveal. Members could miss out on Sunday services because their church met too far away for them to walk, and they could not find a reliable horse. Spiritual, psychological, and economic reasons also kept precious members away, some as far away as the West Indies! Some could be coaxed back, but others were put off by their congregations’ demands for spiritual reconciliation. Upholding standards of spiritual purity while maintaining a socially legitimate existence in broader English society could be almost impossible, however. Many chose to marry in their parish church to ensure the legitimacy of their unions, for example, notwithstanding the denunciations of their churches.

The third section and the final chapter of the book treat the complex role narratives of experiences played in defining these communities. Offering a narrative of one's spiritual experience became a widely accepted custom after churches in Massachusetts pioneered it in the 1630s. However, they raised a variety of issues of social and ethical delicacy. How public did they have to be? Individual congregations ultimately decided these issues in different ways. Perhaps the most important point Dunan-Page makes about what are often misrepresented as conversion narratives is the importance of oral culture and performance in making them convincing to church members.

Our modern perspective on puritanism, which relies overmuch on written and published accounts, too easily misses out on these and many other aspects of the lived religious experience of these “puritans” that Dunan-Page has uncovered. She shows they were very much a part of English society, even as they strove with mixed success to keep it at a spiritually protective distance.