The creation and recreation of Puritanism

The creation and recreation of Puritanism This paper questions some persisting assumptions about the concept, 'Puritanism'. Thus it seeks to build upon one of Patrick Collinson's signal achievements: the gradual abandonment of such monolithic assumptions in favour of a polymorphous conception of Protestant beliefs.1 It also tries to respond to Collinson's admonition that 'the prime object of our investigation' should be to discover the theological, moral and social tensions behind the use of the term in contemporary discourse, although it applies that advice differently, to a preliminary sketch of the historical circumstances conditioning historians' utilisation of the word 'Puritanism' since the seventeenth century.2 'Puritanism' acquired much of its current meaning in the early nineteenth century, as the reification of a collection of very diverse ideas and attitudes. But the concept of 'Puritanism' and its earlier form, simply 'Puritan', can be traced back through a series of influential historical works, to show that in each generation historians have recreated the concept, consistently retaining many features while revising others. This recreative process has erected a series of veils obscuring past realities from our sight. The meaning so consistently attributed to 'Puritanism', still very apparent today, actually originated in the political, social and cultural tensions of Tudor and Stuart England, especially in the Restoration period when those tensions were most acute. Like a continuously mutating vims, that contested meaning, once entered into historiography, was able to infect succeeeding generations in propitious circumstances. Until w e recognise its origins, this reified concept cannot be replaced with a more contingent, 1 In contrasting Patrick Collinson's The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, London 1967, with his The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 15591625 , Oxford, 1982, one sees how, in much more than their titles, his works offer increasingly supple and complex conceptions of the. varieties of English religious practice associated with the term, 'Godly People'. 2 Idem, 'A Comment: Concerning the Name Puritan', Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31.4 (1980), 463-82, 487-88. M y departure from Collinson's initial agenda avoids the elision between 'Puritanism' and the Civil War which he went on to make, as criticised by M . Finlaysqn, Historians, Puritanism, and the English Revolution: The Religious Factor in English Politics before and after the Interregnum, Toronto, 1983, p. 69. P A R E R G O N ns 14.1 (July 1996) 32 G. J. R. Parry protean and polymorphous understanding of the word 'Puritanism' or, indeed, of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religion. A m o n g the 'veils' influencing discussions of the subject at the present time, thefirstcomprises the current practice in textbooks of using 'puritan' attitudes and 'puritanism' to explain opposition to Stuart authority.3 Ostensibly an advance on the shibboleths of an earlier scholarly generation, this has been restated, in a more sophisticated but fundamentally similar form, in the 'counter-revisionist' utilisation of 'puritanism' as an implicitly revolutionary ideology which had an impact on seventeenth-century politics. The implications of the reshaping of the category 'puritan' by Stuart polemical contingency, as reflected in the evidence they present, escapes its authors.4 The explanatory power ascribed in this argument to 'puritanism' only differs in its lack of a teleological gloss from the extremely influential interpretation propounded by Christopher Hill since the 1940s.5 Hill's explicitly Marxist reading of the 1640s as a fully acknowledged 'class war' between a feudal state and a new bourgeois class inspired by 'puritanism', which enabled the freer growth of capitalism, locates this struggle about 'the whole nature and future development of English society' in the grand historical process visible to dialectical materialists. For Hill, religious discourse was merely a conduit which allowed him to elaborate a materialist argument in which underlying economic change prepared the way for future proletarian revolution.6 3 R. Lockyer, The Early Stuarts, A Political History of England 1603-1642, London, 1989; C. Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments, English History 1509-1660, Oxford, 1971, corr. edn 1978, pp. 340-41. The fact that B. Coward, The Stuart Age, London, 1980, pp. 71-75, felt it necessary to argue against the revolutionary implications attributed to 'Puritan' ideology and styles of thinking and against its...