THE ASSISTANCE FROM OTHERS that enabled me to write this book includes, first and foremost, a senior fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Thanks to Steve Hindle, the Director of Research, I spent nine months rummaging through the Huntington’s inexhaustible collection of early modern printed books. I have depended as well on the Andover-Harvard Library of Harvard Divinity School, a collection admirably comprehensive in its holdings of modern scholarship and blessed with exceptionally helpful reference librarians. I thank Nell Carlson for aiding my access to rare books, Michelle Gautier for promptness in arranging interlibrary loans, and Gloria Korsman for answering a wide range of queries.
The Huntington fellows’ weekly workshop responded to a section of chapter 4, and the obligatory senior fellows’ lecture was a moment for sharing themes and questions with a broader audience. I am also indebted to faculty at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Notre Dame University, Princeton University, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Washington University (St. Louis), the Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, the early Americanists’ community in Japan, and Andover-Harvard Library for inviting me to describe the project to informed audiences. I owe a special thanks to the members of the Early Modern History Seminar, Cambridge University, for their response to an early (indeed, premature) description of the project. Jonathan Baddley helped with research as the book was coming to completion, and Jennifer Conforti created the electronic version of the manuscript.
Others who know more than I do about aspects of Puritan history have commented on draft chapters. I thank especially Ann Hughes, Margo Todd, John Coffey, Debora Shuger, and (on apocalypticism) Richard Cogley. The two anonymous readers’ reports were also helpful. Any errors that remain are entirely of my doing. Others who have directed me to books and questions I would have overlooked include Lawrence Buell, Matthew Kadane, David Little, Kevin Madigan, Brent Sirota, Roger Thompson, Alexandra Walsham, and Adrian Weimer. My late friend and colleague Francois Bovon passed away before this book was very far along, but his generous enthusiasm sustained me in the early going.
In Hebrews 12:1, Paul speaks of a “great cloud of witnesses” that surround the godly. In my case the secular equivalent has been threefold: students at Harvard and adjacent seminaries and universities who, since the early 1990s, have participated in a seminar on the history of the Puritan movement; the many historians who, since the late nineteenth century, have dedicated themselves to understanding early modern British political, social, and institutional history; and the much smaller group of historians, most of them affiliated with contemporary evangelicalism on both sides of the Atlantic, who in recent years have revisited Reformed/Puritan theology. What I owe to the second and third groups is visible in the many citations to their work.
Yet I should underscore my distance from the debates that animate much of the work on Tudor-Stuart Britain and Reformed theology. To cite two examples of the former, my purpose was never to explain the causes of the civil war that broke out in 1642 or to validate any single interpretation of James VI and I. Instead, I have tried to follow the threads of doctrine, culture, and practice that passed from the Reformed international to early modern Britain. Always controversial, the Puritan movement aspired to evangelize the British people, transform local churches into sanctified communities, introduce godly rule in civil society, and eliminate every “remnant” of Catholicism from worship. Controversy bred confusion and conflict within the movement about this program—as things turned, especially about the nature of the visible church and the relationship between conscience or the regulative principle and the authority of the civil state and/or state church. My deepest regret is that my narrative abbreviates or passes by in silence the many close studies of ideas, situations, and texts historians of Tudor-Stuart Britain and early modern theology have published during the past three decades. The workings of parliaments in England and general assemblies in Scotland are a case in point, as is doctrine. There are no simple doctrines or passages in Scripture, no simple version of the practical divinity, and no simple or unmediated practices, truths I have evoked but not always documented as richly as I would have wished. Such is the price one pays for a book of this kind.
Finally, I thank those at Princeton University Press who endorsed my proposal for a “short” book and, despite the evolution of short into long, have seen it through the process of publication: first and foremost, Brigitta van Rheinberg and Eric Crahan and, on the side of production, Ellen Foos and Molan Goldstein.