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The Puritan Moment
365p maroon paperback, from a Cambridge college library with usual library markings otherwise very good, minor wear to cover, text firm and clean
384 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1983
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October 2, 2023
It's good. A real page-turner. I judge books on the 17th century primarily by how the reading experience feels and only secondarily by what I think about the quality of the scholarship. This book delivers on both fronts.
The main thrust of the interpretation here is that Puritanism as a revolutionary movement was both hyper-local in its actual power structures (this book focuses on the country of Essex) and imperialistic on a global scale in the scope of its concerns. Religious and social concerns can't really be separated by the historian because they were not separate to the people on the ground in Essex in the early 17c, but at the same time it was Puritanism that validated rebellion and eventually revolution. At the same same time, the pissed-off proletariat was pissed off because the local economy was busted, and that also mattered — but without the "godly aristocrats" of the local power structure aligning the lower and middle classes in a Puritan, anti-Catholic coalition, the thing might not have blown up all the way into civil war.
I don't really know anything about the scholarly field here, or what the state of it is now as compared to 1983, when this book was published by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, but it seems like Hunt did some very cool work with primary sources in chapters 9-11 ("Noble Professors", "The Sins of Manasseh", and "The Puritan Moment"). This sequence begins, "We know too little about the Puritan gentry", then goes deep into a narrative based largely on letters in the British Museum. I've never read anything quite like it, but it is a bit like Adam Nicolson's Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War.
I like the decision to focus this whole book on Essex. I wish something like this book existed for Durham and Northumberland.
The main thrust of the interpretation here is that Puritanism as a revolutionary movement was both hyper-local in its actual power structures (this book focuses on the country of Essex) and imperialistic on a global scale in the scope of its concerns. Religious and social concerns can't really be separated by the historian because they were not separate to the people on the ground in Essex in the early 17c, but at the same time it was Puritanism that validated rebellion and eventually revolution. At the same same time, the pissed-off proletariat was pissed off because the local economy was busted, and that also mattered — but without the "godly aristocrats" of the local power structure aligning the lower and middle classes in a Puritan, anti-Catholic coalition, the thing might not have blown up all the way into civil war.
I don't really know anything about the scholarly field here, or what the state of it is now as compared to 1983, when this book was published by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, but it seems like Hunt did some very cool work with primary sources in chapters 9-11 ("Noble Professors", "The Sins of Manasseh", and "The Puritan Moment"). This sequence begins, "We know too little about the Puritan gentry", then goes deep into a narrative based largely on letters in the British Museum. I've never read anything quite like it, but it is a bit like Adam Nicolson's Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War.
I like the decision to focus this whole book on Essex. I wish something like this book existed for Durham and Northumberland.
Displaying 1 of 1 review