Seminar Overview:

This will be a second seminar on the key theme of Puritanism. Our earlier seminar will have focused largely on Puritanism as a movement for institutional and doctrinal reform in the Church. That theme continues to be important in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign, but the main emphasis in this session will be on the social and cultural aspects of Puritanism, and the question of Puritan, or ‘godly’, identity. We will discuss why Puritanism was so divisive, and the extent to which anti-Puritanism became an important force within the church and wider society.

Questions for discussion:

- Was Puritanism’s relationship to ‘popular culture’ entirely antagonistic?

- Did Puritanism properly exist, or was it invented?

- Can we regard Elizabethan anti-Puritanism as a coherent ‘ideology’?

 

Seminar Reading:

*Black, Joseph L,. ed., The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge, 2008) [PM]

Black, Joseph L., ed., The Martin Marprelate Press: A Documentary History (an online companion to the above book) https://people.umass.edu/marprelate/index.html

Black, Joseph, ‘The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588-89), Anti-Martinism, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 28 (1997)

*Bremer, Francis and Rydell, Ellen, ‘Performance Art? Puritans in the Pulpit’, History Today (Sep. 1995)

Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), parts 5-8

Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Shearmen’s Tree and the Preacher: The Strange Death of Merry England in Shrewsbury and Beyond’, in Patrick Collinson and John Craig, eds, The Reformation in English Towns 1500-1640 (Basingstoke, 1998)

*Collinson, Patrick, Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism’, in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995)

Collinson, Patrick, ‘Ben Johnson’s Bartholomew Fair: The Theatre Constructs Puritanism’, in David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (eds.), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649 (Cambridge, 1995)

Collinson, Patrick, ‘Puritanism and the Poor’, in Rosemary Horrox and Sarah Rees Jones (eds.), Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200-1630 (Cambridge, 2001)

Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1988), esp. chaps 4-5

*Collinson, Patrick, ‘From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation’, in Peter Marshall, ed., The Impact of the English Reformation (London, 1997)

Collinson, Patrick, From Cranmer to Sancroft (London, 2006), chaps 5-6

Durston, Christopher and Eales, Jacqueline, eds., The Culture of English Puritanism 1560-1700 (Basingstoke, 1996).

*Freeman, Thomas, ‘Demons, Deviance and Defiance: John Darrell and the Politics of Exorcism in Late Elizabethan England’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660 (Woodbridge, 2000).

*Haigh, Christopher, ‘The Character of an Antipuritan’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 35 (2004)

Haigh, Christopher, The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford, 2007), chaps 5-6 [E]

Hambrick-Stowe, Charles, ‘Practical Divinity and Spirituality’, in Coffey, John and Lim, Paul, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008) [E]

Hunt, Arnold, ‘The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 161 (1998).

Hunt, Arnold, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590-1640 (Cambridge, 2010), esp chaps 1, 5, 7

Ingram, Martin, ‘Religion, Communities and Moral Discipline in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in Kaspar von Greyerz, ed., Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (London, 1984).

Kendall, R. T., Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford, 1979).

*Lake, Peter, ‘The Significance of the Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 31 (1980).

Lake, Peter, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982).

*Lake, Peter, ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570-1635’, Past and Present, 114 (1987).

Lake, Peter, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988).

Lake, Peter with Questier, Michael, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven and London, 2002), sections 3-5

Lake, Peter, ‘Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter, eds., Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006)

Lake, Peter, ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy; or John Whitgift, Antipuritanism, and the “Invention” of Popularity’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40 (2010)

*Lake, Peter, ‘“Puritans” and “Anglicans” in the History of the Post-Reformation English Church’, in Milton, Anthony, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism: Vol I (Oxford, 2017).

MacCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘The Latitude of the Church of England’, in Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter, eds., Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006)

McCullough, Peter Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998).

Merritt, Julia ‘The Cradle of Laudianism? Westminster Abbey, 1558-1630’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52 (2001).

Parker, Kenneth, The English Sabbath: A Study of Doctrine and Discipline from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1988).

Parker, Kenneth, and Carlson, Eric, ‘Practical Divinity’: The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot, 1998).

Perrott, M. E. C., ‘Richard Hooker and the Problem of Authority in the Elizabethan Church’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 49 (1998)

Shagan, Ethan H., ‘The English Inquisition: Constitutional Conflict and Ecclesiastical Law in the 1590s’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004).

Spufford, Margaret, ‘Puritanism and Social Control?’, in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985).

*Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘Popular Puritan Mentality in late Elizabethan England’, in Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530-1700 (Manchester, 2001)

Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘The Puritan Paradigm in English Politics, 1558–1642’, Historical Journal , 53 (2010)

Usher, Brett, ‘The Fortunes of English Puritanism: An Elizabethan Perspective’, in Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter, eds., Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006)

Wallace, Dewey, ‘Puritan Polemical Divinity and Doctrinal Controversy’, in Coffey, John and Lim, Paul, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008) [E]

Walsham, Alexandra, ‘“Frantick Hackett”: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’, Historical Journal , 41 (1998)

*Walsham, Alexandra, ‘The Godly and Popular Culture’, in Coffey, John and Lim, Paul, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008) [E]

Winship, Michael P., ‘Puritans, Politics, and Lunacy: The Copinger-Hacket Conspiracy as the Apotheosis of Elizabethan Presbyterianism’, Sixteenth Century Journal , 38 (2007)

Winship, Michael P., ‘Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c. 1570–1606’, English Historical Review, 510 (2009)

*Winship, Michael P., Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (New Haven and London, 2018), chaps. 5-6

 

Documents:

‘Extract from Philip Stubbes’ Anatomy of Abuses on keeping the Sabbath’, in David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, eds, Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook (London, 1996), pp. 105-7, or 2nd edition ebookLink opens in a new window (2005), Chapter III ("Religious Culture and Religious Contest"), pp. 119-22.

‘William Perkins on Predestination’, in David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, eds, Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook (London, 1996), pp. 114-20, or 2nd edition ebookLink opens in a new window (2005), Chapter III ("Religious Culture and Religious Contest"), pp. 132-40.

‘Puritan diaries: extracts from Samuel Ward, 1595, and Margaret Hoby, 1599’. For the extract from Ward see: David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, eds, Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook (London, 1996), pp. 120-2, or 2nd edition ebookLink opens in a new window (2005), Chapter III ("Religious Culture and Religious Contest"), pp. 144-46. /// For the extract from Hoby, however, see: Claire Cross, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (London, 1968), pp. 223-4. Click HERELink opens in a new window.

Presbyterian pressure in parliament: speeches by Job Throckmorton and Christopher Hatton’, EHD, pp. 862-73. See Reading list

The Marprelate Controversy: ‘An Epistle to the Terrible Priests of the Convocation House’, EHD, pp. 1193-99. See Reading list