Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Patrick Collinson
- 1 Nicolas Pithou: experience, conscience and history in the French civil wars
- 2 Elizabethan players and minstrels and the legislation of 1572 against retainers and vagabonds
- 3 Cleanliness and godliness in early modern England
- 4 Blood is their argument: men of war and soldiers in Shakespeare and others
- 5 Pragmatic readers: knowledge transactions and scholarly services in late Elizabethan England
- 6 The gardens of Sir Nicholas and Sir Francis Bacon: an enigma resolved and a mind explored
- 7 The Protestant idea of marriage in early modern England
- 8 James VI and I: furnishing the churches in his two kingdoms
- 9 A British patriarchy? Ecclesiastical imperialism under the early Stuarts
- 10 The Anglo-Scottish Union 1603–1643: a success?
- 11 Popery, purity and Providence: deciphering the New England experiment
- 12 Provincial preaching on the eve of the Civil War: some West Riding fast sermons
- 13 Popular form, Puritan content? Two Puritan appropriations of the murder pamphlet from mid-seventeenth-century London
- 14 The two ‘National Churches’ of 1691 and 1829
- Bibliography of the published writings of Patrick Collinson, 1957–1992
- Index
14 - The two ‘National Churches’ of 1691 and 1829
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Patrick Collinson
- 1 Nicolas Pithou: experience, conscience and history in the French civil wars
- 2 Elizabethan players and minstrels and the legislation of 1572 against retainers and vagabonds
- 3 Cleanliness and godliness in early modern England
- 4 Blood is their argument: men of war and soldiers in Shakespeare and others
- 5 Pragmatic readers: knowledge transactions and scholarly services in late Elizabethan England
- 6 The gardens of Sir Nicholas and Sir Francis Bacon: an enigma resolved and a mind explored
- 7 The Protestant idea of marriage in early modern England
- 8 James VI and I: furnishing the churches in his two kingdoms
- 9 A British patriarchy? Ecclesiastical imperialism under the early Stuarts
- 10 The Anglo-Scottish Union 1603–1643: a success?
- 11 Popery, purity and Providence: deciphering the New England experiment
- 12 Provincial preaching on the eve of the Civil War: some West Riding fast sermons
- 13 Popular form, Puritan content? Two Puritan appropriations of the murder pamphlet from mid-seventeenth-century London
- 14 The two ‘National Churches’ of 1691 and 1829
- Bibliography of the published writings of Patrick Collinson, 1957–1992
- Index
Summary
Puritanism has a natural tendency to fragment into ever smaller units. That is what their opponents said about the movement, and, just because Samuel Parker and Roger L'Estrange said so, does not make it wrong. The dissidence of dissent is indeed one of the great historical platitudes. Patrick Collinson has never been one to let sleeping platitudes lie, however, and in a notable recent paper he has pointed to the resilience of a contrary strain within Puritanism; of what we might call a centripetal, rather than a centrifugal, tendency. He argues that the voluminous antiseparatist literature did have its effect, individuals could be pulled back from the brink (like Robert Browne himself, the man who gave a name to a tendency), the seceders were in any case less set apart from the rest of the community than was once supposed, combination lectureships strengthened not weakened the established church, and so on. It adds up to a formidable case for taking seriously the possibility of writing a different script for Puritanism, in which it becomes the ally, not the enemy, of a comprehensive national settlement.
Collinson wants historians to maintain an open-endedness: to recognise that by the end of the early years of the seventeenth century (where his analysis stops), it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the evolution of Puritanism would be synonymous with the triumph of the sects.
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- Information
- Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern BritainEssays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, pp. 335 - 352Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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