More often than not the history of puritanism gets told through the voices and actions of puritan clergy. Francis J. Bremer, who has certainly contributed to this overall trend in studies of puritanism, attempts to shifts this focus in his latest offering, Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism. Relying on “hints of what was not being written,” Bremer concentrates “on the puritan laity and their role in shaping that religious movement” (2), arguing that countless ordinary men and women helped shape trans-Atlantic puritanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a variety of ways. While admitting his narrative is not a new one to specialists and that it requires a careful and at times imaginative reading of available sources, Bremer successfully begins to revise the story by tracing not only several of the ways that laity consistently remained involved in the development of English puritanism on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but also the ways that their involvement challenged the clergy and their efforts at reforming and guiding the movement throughout the era.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism is Bremer's ability to guide the reader through the history of the movement known as puritanism. Building on his other important analyses of puritanism, Bremer crafts an accessible narrative that makes his overarching argument about the roles of lay people even more convincing—especially for those new to the subject matter. Locating puritanism's origins in the church's earliest years, Bremer carefully documents the ways the movement developed out of the Protestant Reformation, especially as it occurred in England. During these years, the laity played an active role, even if at times they did so by going underground in resisting the leadership of the Catholic Church. As persecution waned, Bremer argues, these laity accompanied their clergy and came back into the light, actively finding ways to be involved in the vibrant life of the reforming church. The persecuted clergy needed the lay support and generally welcomed their participation, which included lay conferences, lay prophesying, sermon gadding, and lay publications. By focusing on such specific forms of lay involvement throughout the entire time and space of his analysis, whether as reformers in Stuart England, as refugees in the Netherlands, immigrants in colonial New England, or radicals and dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic, Bremer capably demonstrates that lay men and women were not only involved in the puritan reform movement, but also that at times this involvement afforded them considerable amounts of influence and power in shaping puritanism. By framing his story in such a manner, Bremer reveals that puritanism, including the outlying Baptists and Quakers, as a movement offered lay men and women meaningful ways to express their places and significances within the communion of the saints.

If there is a weakness to Bremer's approach, then it is that he is often forced to rely on the examples of somewhat extraordinary lay men and women because the more ordinary laity, those in “the silence of those who established what became the structures of the churches” (2), are unnamed and forgotten to history. For example, the lay people Bremer treats include people such as Brigit Cooke, Henry Barrow, William Brewster, John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Henry Vane, Mary Dyer, and Oliver Cromwell. Most of these men and women hardly seem ordinary. Were Bremer not so knowledgeable of the primary and secondary literature, this potential weakness would nearly certainly be more glaring than it is. In his able hands, however, applying the lessons learned from a focus on the involvement of these more extraordinary laity to those unnamed forgotten men and women forgotten seems more than plausible. Bremer's analysis leaves the reader believing that for every Oliver Cromwell and Mary Dyer there were countless other lay puritans participating in religious conferences, sermon gadding, prophesying, and praying.

When he laments that historians have often minimized the role of the laity in the development of puritanism, Bremer is certainly correct. He is also certainly correct in arguing that such a neglect needs to be revised. Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism makes an admirable step at such a revisionist approach to the history of puritanism as a movement. By building on his own groundbreaking work, as well as the work of scholars such as Christopher Hill, Patrick Collinson, Darrett Rutman, Diarmaid Macculloch, Claire Cross, Stephen Foster, David Hall, and Michael Winship, Bremer persuasively argues that it “was laymen—Vane, Hutchinson, Witter, Clarke, Gorton—who were challenging the boundaries and precipitating the debate, but it was also laymen such as Endecott, Winthrop, Dudley, and Leverett who played key roles in determining how the challenges were to be dealt with” (179). As has often been the case, Bremer provides a foundation in this accessible and convincing treatment on which future scholars of puritanism will do well to build—perhaps even providing identities for nameless lay men and women in ways that Bremer could not do so here.