The Elizabethan Puritan Movement

by Patrick Collinson

Originally published in 1967, this book is a history of church puritanism as a movement and as a political and ecclesiastical organism; of its membership structure and internal contradictions; of the quest for ‘a further reformation’. It tells the fascinating story of the rise of a revolutionary moment and its ultimate destruction.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Church History

530 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Professor Patrick Collinson was a distinguished and much published author in the field of early modern history. A Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1988, he was Regius Professor of History at the University until 1996. He also held a number of academic distinctions, including Fellowship of the British Academy.

Collinson authored his 1957 doctorate on Elizabethan Puritanism under J. E. Neale, and was a lecturer at the University of Khartoum and King's College London. He was professor at the University of Sydney in 1969, then at the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of Sheffield. His 1967 monograph, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, had a great impact on historians' understanding of the movement. The work showed Puritanism to be a significant force within the Elizabethan Church instead of merely a radical group of individuals. By the time of his retirement in 1996, he was one of the doyens of English Reformation history. His short summation of the period, The Reformation, was published in 2003.
Collinson's work laid the foundations, in many ways, for what historians of the English Reformation currently term the 'Calvinist Consensus' in the latter decades of the sixteenth and reign of James I/VI. As such, the belief Puritanism was anything but religiously radical in relation to English, and indeed British, culture stands as one of his great achievements as an historian.

Reviews

[Greg Mathis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collinson's book is seminal in the secondary literature. While many works on Puritanism don't even begin until the Stuart era from 1603 forward, Collinson demonstrates how the movement was fundamentally an Elizabethan one. Indeed, those who out of affection or likemindedness read the Puritans most often are not familiar with the main players of these crucial "forty years of frustrated expectation" (459).
Yet the 17th Century iteration of Puritanism never enjoyed the broad unity seen during the Elizabethan period. The movement was bound to "develop as fragmented sectarianism, agreed as to the delenda but not as to the agenda of further reformation" (466). These facts demonstrate the need to grapple with Collinson's text.

Readers should beware of the advanced level of familiarity with the historical and religious context Collinson expects of his audience.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great work of scholarship. Collinson succeeds, at least with me, in his argument that the division between Anglicanism and puritanism was almost non-existence until reformists were pushed to despair for reform and conformists forced to choose between conforming or separating. Places that lived with benign neglect were not the ones to suffer from schism and controversy. The English were mostly happy to find ways to fit their principles into the constraints of the Church as long as they were not forced to be explicit about those ways. There was always a continuum of belief and local ministers were able to adapt to local mores. The Church’s refusal to give in on minor points needlessly aggravated controversy. Even while complicating over-simplistic portrayals of the controversies, Collinson manages to maintain complete clarity.

The Elizabethan Puritan Movement
Patrick Collinson
Jonathan Cape, London, 1967

“We have said, and say again, that doctrinaire Presbyterianism, and the more extreme and disruptive manifestations of puritanism generally, were aggravated, if not directly generated, by the repression of moderate puritan aspirations.’ 232

“An immediate result of Whitgift’s assault would be to reduce the differences between the majority with moderate puritan inclinations and the extremist minority. If large numbers of preaching ministers resisted subscription to the point of suspension or even deprivation, the archbishop’s position would become exposed and precarious, and the radicals like Field would readily exploit the situation. The puritan press would advertise the folly of thrusting out so many godly preachers at a time ‘when Jesuits, those of the Family of Love and others of all sorts swarm.’” 247

“Once again the evidence requires us to imagine not a clean break with Anglicanism but the kind of pragmatic compromise which was so characteristic of Elizabethan puritanism.” 364

“The ‘meeting of the godly’ was liable to become a conventicle, if not the nucleus of a sect, wherever the godly were deprived of a preaching minister or for any other reason alienated from their parish church.” 377

“If as much attention had been paid by historians to the busy life of the puritan laity in sermons, catechizings and house meetings as has been given to certain acts of ceremonial nonconformity by the puritan clergy, the rationale of the non-separating congregationists would not now seem a mere casuistical curiosity. There was an extensive area of corporate religious experience within the establishment over which the official Church had little control, and which is still for the most part unexplored and unmapped.” 380

“As for those separatist movements which did from time to time erupt, some at least are probably to be understood as the response of such a group to persecution or to the deprivation of its leadership.” 380

“’The meetings of the godly’ therefore deserve close scrutiny, for they may prove to contain the pattern of future developments which were to be as distasteful to presbyterians as to conforming Anglicans. The presbyterians and the puritan ministry in general went forward on the assumption that religious experience would normally be found and contained within the local church, directed and controlled by the teaching of the church and its magistry, by pastor, doctor and elders.” 381

“Yet this year which saw the vindication of English protestantism marked the beginning of a definite decline in the fortunes of the puritan movement. Not of puritan religion: that was something now widely dispersed and year by year growing roots which were not to be easily torn out. But puritanism as an organized force devoted to the achievement of a presbyterian revision of the ‘outward face’ of the Church was now under sentence.” 385

“He was warned that in a county deeply divided between ‘obstinate papists’ and ‘zealous professors of religion’ the effect of his order [to conformity] would be to confirm them in their recusancy and drive the other into schism.” 406

“At the earlier stages of our story we had occasion, repeatedly, to notice that Elizabethan puritanism was a phenomenon both wider and more elusive than presbyterianism.” 432

“If a further reformation of the Church of England was, for the moment, out of the question, it was time to turn with vigour to the reformation of towns, parishes, families and individuals, to be lost in the warfare of the spirit. Hence the paradox that the miscarriage of the further reformation coincided with the birth of the great age of puritan religious experience.” 433

“I should like to think that it [the book] has helped to establish this that surrender to the drastic prescriptions of the presbyterians on the one hand, and exclusion from an interest in the national Church of the great and growing body of religious opinion and experience which we know as puritanism on the other, were never in this period the simple alternatives open to the government of the Church of England. That our modern conception of Anglicanism commonly excludes puritanism is both a distortion of a part of our religious history and a memorial to one of its more regrettable

[Joel Zartman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, at least I've finished it.

[AskHistorians]

A bit more specific but the best account of perhaps the most interesting period of religious change in English History by one of its greatest historians, though it is quite a dense book.