Abstract
Following the death of Elizabeth in 1603, her Scottish kinsman James Stuart, James VI of Scotland, came to the throne of England as James I. Because Presbyterian reform had accomplished in Scotland many of the changes long sought by English puritans, English reformers hoped that the new monarch would be receptive to modifications of the Church of England. Few realized that the Scottish monarch’s apparent sympathy to English reform was calculated to insure that he would succeed Elizabeth, and that it cloaked a distaste for the puritan-like Presbyterian system of his native land. A petition to the king supposedly signed by over a thousand Englishmen sought his approval for a variety of reforms. But at the Hampton Court Conference King James rejected most of the puritan program, though he did agree to a new, authorized translation of the scriptures (what has become known as the King James Bible).
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Notes
Patrick Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 33.
Francis J. Bremer, First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2012), 47.
Francis J. Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 57–9.
Jeremy Dupertius Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, MA: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2009), 212.
For lectureship see Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), esp. 48ff., and
Paul Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1660 (Stanford University Press, 1970).
Claire Cross, Church and People, 1450–1660: The Triumph of the Laity in the English Church (Hassocks: Harvester, 1976), 184.
Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, 85–6. The story of the Feoffees is fully examined in Isabel M. Calder, ed., The Activities of the Puritan Faction of the Church of England, 1625–1633 (London: Church Historical Society, 1957).
Samuel Clarke, quoted in Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford University Press, 1983), 259.
Alexandra Walsham, “The Godly and Popular Culture,” in John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 287.
The importance of preaching and the ways in which believers absorbed the message is the subject of Arnold Hunt’s The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Oliver Heywood, quoted in Bremer, Congregational Communion, 39. For a discussion of Rogers’s preaching style and that of other puritan preachers see Francis J. Bremer and Ellen Rydell, “Performance Art? Puritans in the Pulpit,” History Today, 45 (September 1995), 50–4.
Quoted in Peter Iver Kaufman, Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 6.
Bownd, quoted in Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford University Press, 1982), 265.
John Cotton, quoted in Charles Hambrick-Stowe, “Christ the Fountain of Life by John Cotton,” in Kelly M. Kapic and Randall C. Gleason, eds, The Devoted Life: An Invitation to the Puritan Classics (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004), 77.
Rogers, quoted in Diane Willen, “‘Communion of the Saints’: Spiritual Reciprocity and the Godly Community in Early Modern England,” Albion, 27 (1995), 19.
Canons 11, 71, 72, and 73 in Gerald Bray, ed., The Anglican Canons 1529–1947 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), 279, 363–5.
Cotton, quoted in Jesper Rosenmeir, ‘Spiritual Concupiscence’: John Cotton’s English Years, 1584–1633 (Boston, UK: Richard Kay, 2012), 111, where he discusses the covenanted group in some detail.
Eliot, quoted in Geoffrey Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640–1660, 2nd edn (Weston Rhyn, UK: Quinta Press, 2001), 83.
Kenneth Fincham, ed., Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, Volume II (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), 24.
Two laymen who compiled sermon notebooks at this period were John Winthrop and Robert Keayne. Both manuscript notebooks are in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. For Winthrop see Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 119. A transcription of his sermon notebook will be part of Francis J. Bremer, ed., Winthrop Papers: Religious Manuscripts, to be published by the Massachusetts Historical Society. Keayne’s notes on sermons in England are discussed in Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, 81. A transcription of Keayne’s English notes is included in Susan B. Ortman, “Gadding about London in Search of a Proper Sermon: How Robert Keayne’s Sermon Notes from 1627–28 Inform Us about the Religious and Political Issues Facing the London Puritan Community” (Millersville University of Pennsylvania MA thesis, 2004). For sermon notes see also
Meredith Marie Neuman, Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
Heywood, quoted in Stephen Foster, “New England and the Challenge of Heresy: 1630–1660: The Puritan Crisis in Transatlantic Perspective,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 38 (1981), 627.
Quartermayne, quoted in David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford University Press, 2006), 145.
Alec Ryrie, “Congregations, Conventicles, and the Nature of Early Scottish Protestantism,” Past & Present, 191 (2006), 53. The main thrust of the article is to cast doubt on John Knox’s reconstruction of more institutional origins of the Scottish Reformation and to emphasize more lay-driven, informal processes. Margo Todd points to the role of the laity in The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), especially 361, 363. The lay involvement in the religion of Edinburgh is discussed in depth in
Laura A. M. Stewart, Urban Politics and British Civil Wars: Edinburgh, 1617–53 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). I thank Dr. Todd for pointing me to this study.
Sibbes, quoted in Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, with a new introduction by Peter Lake (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 39.
Ward, quoted in John Craig, “Bodies at Prayer in Early Modern England,” in Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie, Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 181.
David George Mullan, Narratives of the Religious Self in Early-Modern Scotland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 13, 18.
This is discussed in Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century Anglophone World (Oxford University Press, 2012), 185. The fact that so-called “conversion narratives” were a report from the battlefield and not a statement of final victory has often been overlooked by those who focus on the use of these narratives in New England.
Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 201.
Quoted in Kate Narveson, “‘Their practice bringeth little profit’: Clerical Anxieties about Lay Scripture Reading in Early Modern England,” in Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie, eds, Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 179.
Jenison, quoted in David R. Como, “Women, Prophecy, and Authority in Early Stuart Puritanism,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 61 (1998), 205.
Fenwick, quoted in David Como, introduction, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Series I: Printed Writings, 1500–1640: Part 4, Volume 5: Anne Phoenix (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), ix.
Marilyn J. Westerkamp, “Anne Hutchinson, Sectarian Mysticism, and the Puritan Order,” Church History, 59 (1990), 488.
John Morrill, “Renaming England’s Wars of Religion,” in Charles A. Prior and Glenn Burgess, eds, England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 321.
Peter Lake, “Puritanism, Familism, and Heresy in Early Stuart England: The Case of John Etherington Revisited,” in David Lowenstein and John Marshall, eds, Heresy, Lityerature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 95–6.
Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford University Press, 1982), 168.
Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616–1649 (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 36.
Peter Lake and David Como, “‘Orthodoxy’ and Its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of ‘Consensus’ in the London (Puritan) Underground,” Journal of British Studies, 39 (2000), 45.
See the discussion of How in John Donoghue, Fire Under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 39–42.
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Bremer, F.J. (2015). Lay Puritans in Stuart England. In: Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137352897_4
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