John Bunyan declared that 'it pleased me much to contend with great earnestness for the Word of faith', and he and other Puritans were not slack in doing so. The theological literature of the Protestant Reformation and its seventeenth-century aftermath (including that written by English and American Puritans) was shaped by controversy. Doctrinal differences from Roman Catholicism had to be defended, boundaries drawn among Protestant factions and Christian truth defended against gainsayers. Such theological polemic was not confined to treatises written in the heat of doctrinal debate but spilled over into catechetical, systematic, exegetical, homiletic and even devotional works. Of course theological controversy was not new in the seventeenth century: Pauline and other New Testament letters reflected early Christian controversy, the creedal formulations of ancient Christianity were moulded by theological conflict and in the later middle ages theological polemic flourished in the new universities abetted by Aristotelian logic and dialectical speculation, producing the precision of scholasticism. Later, the theology of Renaissance Christian humanists such as Erasmus was polemical in its critique of such scholasticism. The doctrinal positions taken up and defended by Puritans were for the most part not original to them, but were rather the stock in trade of what is imprecisely designated Calvinist or more properly Reformed theology.

The task of delineating the relationship between Puritanism and popular culture may be compared with walking into a minefield that contains not merely hidden explosive devices but also treacherous pockets of quicksand. The hapless scholar is simultaneously confronted by two conceptual and definitional hazards. Both the subjects of enquiry are slippery, contentious and intractable; both have been the focus of prolonged and inconclusive debates about their nature, shape and usefulness as analytical tools; both are capable of being dismissed as no more than optical illusions. As discussed elsewhere in this volume, historians have spilt considerable quantities of ink attempting to capture the essence and significance of 'Puritanism'. Likened to a 'protean beast' and 'dragon lurking in the path of every student of the period', to some the term has seemed 'an admirable refuge from clarity of thought' that should be banished permanently from academic discourse. Others uphold its value as a way of characterising the distinctive style of piety practised by a zealous subset of Protestants in the English-speaking world - an affective, evangelical piety rooted in an experimental application of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and revolving around preaching, prayer and pious reading of the Bible and other godly books. Sometimes combined with a determination to work for further reform of the structures of ecclesiastical government and with discontent about the 'popish' liturgical and ceremonial residues that remained within the church, it characteristically involved strenuous commitment to upholding a strict moral code.

After generations of quarrelling amongst English historians about how to define 'Puritan', a set of fundamental criteria is now generally accepted. Whatever the remaining disputes over nuances of the term, most scholars understand Puritans as those within the Protestant state church with an agenda for further protestantisation (or purification) of that church, along several lines. First, because their anti-Catholicism had a particular virulence, they sought to eliminate the 'dregs of popery' remaining in the Church of England - images, symbols, ceremonies, vestments and festivities devoted to saints or markers on the liturgical calendar. Second, they sought a greater stress on preaching, Sabbath observance and the systematic inculcation of biblical knowledge and Reformed theology. Third, they desired an effective moral discipline to create the sort of godly milieu in which full Reformation of the church could happen and (not incidentally) to avert well-deserved divine wrath on sinful communities. The people we label 'Puritans' had a sense of themselves and what they were about, of their own identity as separate from the less godly around them. They had a decidedly elevated spiritual temperature, as the Elizabethan writer Percival Wiburn recognised when he declaimed in 1581, 'the hotter sort of Protestants are called Puritans'. Wiburn was more careful with his definition than is often credited: he insisted that we 'make but one religion of those that you call Protestants and Puritans'; the latter simply 'join godly knowledge with their zeal' to avoid the sinful lukewarmness of the Laodicean church. Puritans lay along the spectrum of Protestant belief within the English church; by these criteria they were not separatists, though their spiritual fire generated a frequently intolerable warmth.

Patrick Collinson, in The Religion of Protestants, discusses the divergent streams within English Protestantism, emphasising the role of episcopacy in the nation's politics of religion since the Reformation was brought to the English by Henry VIII's royal injunction: “They almost oblige us declare our preferences for one of two alternative episcopal strategies and, among historians . . . we must line up either with Richard Baxter, who wrote of the Elizabethan Archbishop Grindal, the soul of protestant moderation: 'Such bishops would have prevented our contentions and wars'; or with Clarendon, for whom the . . . death of . . . Archbishop Bancroft in 1610 was one of the earliest events to which it was profitable to refer in accounting for the Great Rebellion - 'with whom died', wrote Heylyn of Bancroft, 'the Uniformity of the Church of England'.” What is fascinating is that both Baxter and Heylyn are cited as representatives of two opposing historiographical trends concerning seventeenth-century England, both then and even now. The common question facing Heylyn and Baxter was: who stood for the true Church of England? Inherent in this question were conflicting versions of ecclesiological definition, setting at odds former co-religionists who shared episcopal ordinations, zeal against separatismand radicalism, and the vision of a godly nation at prayer.

The Church of England has become renowned for its ambivalent relationship with the Reformed churches of the continent. Puritans have therefore traditionally been distinguished (by Antipuritans, at least) by the supposed intimacy of their relationship with the theology and liturgy of the continental Reformed churches. It is true, as we shall see, that they displayed an especial readiness to urge the example of the foreign churches in debates over church government and liturgy, to cultivate personal links with the foreign churches, to support distressed foreign Protestants by charitable donations, and to encourage military support for their co-religionists abroad in their struggles with the forces of international Roman Catholicism. But the Puritans' relationship with the continental Reformed churches was a complex and changing one, and was characterised as much by tension and ambiguity as by instinctive fraternalism, especially as English Puritanism itself fractured during the seventeenth century.

The crisis that overwhelmed Britain and Ireland in the mid seventeenth century has no agreed title: the English Revolution, the Great Rebellion, the Civil Wars and Interregnum, England's (or Britain's) War(s) of Religion, the War(s) of the Three Kingdoms, the Puritan Revolution. The last had a limited shelf life - coined by S.R. Gardiner in 18761 and used in the title of his influential collection of Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625-1660 (1889) but not in his great multi-volume history of the period. It was promoted hard by American historians (especially literary historians) between the 1930s and the 1960s and then abandoned. It is certainly not how any Puritan at the time described what they were living through. It has existed to describe a process but not its outcome. The case for calling the crisis a Puritan Revolution is strongest in relation to the struggle to 'reform the reformation' in the period 1640-6, and - quite separately - to describe the 'teeming liberty' of the years 1646-53, when ecclesial discipline broke down and hundreds of 'gathered churches' formed in towns and villages outside the parish system, some defining themselves doctrinally (the Particular and General Baptists, the Fifth Monarchists) and others by their charismatic leaders (the Muggletonians). When Oliver Cromwell became head of state in December 1653, some stability was achieved, with a state church that grew out of Puritan experience and evangelistic zeal, but with a broad measure of liberty for those who did not seek to disturb the peace of others. But there was still plenty of contention and recrimination (with the Quakers at the centre of the maelstrom).

In March of 1630, John Winthrop preached a lay sermon to the men, women and children who were gathered in Southampton to accompany him on a voyage to America, an errand into the wilderness where they planned to erect a new England. These emigrants were Puritans, departing England because of their belief that the assault on godliness being mounted by the king's bishops would only increase in vehemence. They had decided to uproot themselves and their families in order to found a colony where they could not only preserve the religious reforms they had managed to achieve in their native land, but also further advance the purification of worship and belief. This was not the only plan for Puritan colonisation, nor the best supported, which explains how a modest Suffolk landowner and justice of the peace could emerge as its leader. Providence Island for one, with its lists of investors that reads like a 'Who's Who' of the future Long Parliament, had more cachet. But it would be New England that would achieve the greatest success. In his sermon, later labelled 'A Model of Christian Charity', Winthrop reminded them of the social gospel they had heard many times before. They were, in the New World, to be knit together as one community, to 'partake of each other's strength and infirmity, joy and sorrow, weal and woe'. 'The care of the public must oversway all private respects.' They were entering into a covenant with God in which they pledged themselves 'to improve our lives' and 'to do more service to the Lord'. If they lived up to their obligations, 'the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as his own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with', and they would become 'as a city upon a hill'.

The 1660s saw sharp changes in the situation of Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic. The provisions of the Act of Conformity of 1662, one of several punitive measures enacted by the English government after the restoration of Charles II in 1660, made it virtually impossible for Puritan-minded clergy to evade the canons of the Church of England, as so many had done before 1640. Thereafter, nonconformity or 'Dissent' referred to people who practised their Protestantism outside the church. No transition of this magnitude occurred in New England, where patterns of culture that we may safely name Puritan retained their hegemony. But the colonists would undergo an 'adjustment to empire' that altered the connections between civil and religious life. Simultaneously, congregations and clergy began a process of reworking the basis of church membership. Each of these phases of change was controversial, spawning contested elections and sharp conflicts in colonies and local communities. Yet any visitor to New England at the turn of the century would have noticed many elements of continuity. The Platform of Discipline or 'Cambridge Platform' of 1648 was still a persuasive description of the Congregational Way. In their everyday preaching the clergy persisted in emphasising the difference between 'vital' or 'experimental' religion and religion that was external, a matter of mere 'formality'. Meanwhile, congregations and ministers were practising rituals of fasts and thanksgivings that flowed from long-persisting assumptions about a covenanted people's obligations to observe God's will. For these and other reasons New England seemed to some contemporaries a society in which social life was thoroughly penetrated by the work of 'reformation' that had meant so much to the Puritan movement.

'She filled every Relation with the Exercise of such Graces and Duties as were suitable thereunto, knowing that where Relative duties are neglected, and not made Conscience of, there also our pretended Religion is in Vain. First, As a Wife; She was singular, and very Exemplary, in that reverence and obedience which she yielded to her Husband, both in Words and Deeds.' Thus the ejected minister and biographer Samuel Clarke eulogised his wife of fifty years in the life he published after her death. This typical if problematic source for a Puritan woman introduces some of the themes of this chapter. Puritan divinity had implications for all aspects of human life; Puritans were exhorted to demonstrate their faith through the daily performance of 'relative duties' within their households as well as through pious activities more narrowly defined. For women, the duties of a wife took priority; the implications that followed, and the ways in which women found meaning and influence within Puritan families and networks are a central concern of this chapter. But the hierarchies of gender are part of the fundamental ordering of societies, so we need to consider what Puritanism contributed to the expectations and possibilities for the proper roles and behaviour of women and men. Moreover, gendered language provided a profoundly influential set of symbols and metaphors through which people understood contrast and division (in this context particularly the contrast between the true and false church) and relationships of power and authority (such as the relationship between Christ and the church).

To provide an account of early Stuart Puritanism is, in a sense, to attempt an objective description of a chimera. To look for a creature with a consistent essence, a teleology and an ever-present set of characteristics is counterproductive in that it takes as given exactly that which must be addressed, it assumes what should be at the heart of the question, namely whether, between 1603 and 1640, there was something with sufficiently constant attributes to deserve the unifying term of 'early Stuart Puritanism'. Something like a teleology, or at least a narrative, will be set out, but in order for its status as a meta-narrative to be engaged with as a way of making explicit the issues of contingency and the contextually dependent nature of the identity of the beast. / The changing context of the new reign / The start of the new regime found Puritanism as ambivalent. On the one hand, one result of the Marprelate controversy, the furore over sensationalists like Francis Hacket, the relations with separatists, the legal and literary exchange over the efforts of John Darrell et al. to heal the possessed and the Whitgiftian drive for conformity, was to create multiple responses from Puritans, some seeking distance from disreputable means, others willing to defend their causes. On the other hand, the arrival of a monarch seen as sympathetic to 'reformed' Protestantism encouraged many to bide their time in the hope of a supreme governor closer to their mindset. This tension can be seen to run through individuals as the parodic epitaph attached to Archbishop Whitgift's hearse shows: the investigation revealed connections from more peripheral opponents to ministers fostering reform from within the royal court. This tension between appropriation and subversion will be a recurring theme.

In 1629 William Twisse sent an intriguing letter to his close friend, the Cambridge divine Joseph Mede. Twisse wrote, “I seem to discern a providence of God in causing the opinion of a Thousand years Regnum Sanctorum to be blasted as an Error by the censure passed upon the Chiliasts, to take men from fixing their thoughts too much on that in those days, when the accomplishment was so far removed; but with purpose to revive it in a more seasonable time, when Antichrist's kingdom should draw near to an end.” Twisse was recounting the history of millenarianism, in which the early church condemned the patristic form of this doctrine, known as chiliasm. Not only did the early church censure chiliasm, but by the seventeenth century all three major branches of the Protestant church condemned this eschatological position in their confessional standards. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530, the English Forty-Two Articles of Religion of 1552 and the Reformed Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 unanimously repudiated millenarianism. Yet, Twisse's letter indicated a revival of millenarian interest during the more 'seasonable time' of his day. By the seventeenth century millenarianism was acceptable and popular amongst many Puritans. This introduces a puzzling historical question: how do we explain the rebirth and popularity of such a controversial doctrine amongst seventeenth-century Puritans? In addition, what is the precise relation between millenarianism and Puritanism?

Puritans from the latter decades of the sixteenth through to the early seventeenth centuries dedicated themselves to the theological and spiritual renewal of the church in England. While Puritanism was rooted in traditional strains of English and Catholic piety, its theological shape was influenced early in the Reformation by published works of Reformed theologians on the continent and by the presence of Martin Bucer (1491-1551), a leading Reformer in Switzerland and southern Germany following the death of Ulrich Zwingli, as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University from 1549 until his death. The essential Calvinism of the Puritan movement was reinforced by the memory, kept alive by John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, of martyrdom under the Roman Catholic Queen Mary (reigned 1553-8) and exile in Frankfurt, Strasbourg and Calvin's Geneva. The English Bible translated while in exile, known as the Geneva Bible, was published (1560) with verse numbers and marginal notes that made it the most widely used Bible among Puritans even after the appearance of the Authorised Version in 1611. Fellowship with Reformed theologians in Europe, especially in the Netherlands, throughout the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) further ensured that members of this English branch of the Reformed family participated fully in the international Reformed movement, intent on moving the Church of England in Calvinist directions in every way possible.

Antipuritanism was antecedent to Puritanism, and so merits prior consideration. 'Puritans' were so identified by Antipuritans, out of an intense dislike of all that those people stood for, and it was some considerable time before this stereotypical, antithetical stigma hardened into something almost tangible, a word which instantly evoked a widely shared set of assumptions and prejudices; longer still before it was acknowledged and accepted as an honourable badge by those to whom it was attached. In the first instance, 'Puritans' were Puritans in the eye of the beholder and it is with the beholder that we should begin. This is, of course, a very common if not universal phenomenon. In the mid seventeenth century 'Independent' was in origin a hostile construction deployed by those who came to be known as 'Presbyterians'. The stigma 'Puritan' was at first a piece of Antiprotestantism, in that it may have originated with exiled Catholic polemicists who found this reference to ancient perfectionist heresies a convenient tar with which to brush the Elizabethan Protestant establishment. According to more than one source, the first Catholic controversialist to use the word was Nicholas Sander. Thomas Stapleton, in a book printed in Antwerp in June 1565, refers, almost incidentally, to 'the Puritans off our countre'. John Martial, in a polemic about reverence for the cross (June 1566), has 'whote [hot] Puritanes of the new clergie' and 'a plaine, puritaine, and notorious protestant'. But these home thoughts from abroad were perhaps already indebted to the domestic and internecine quarrels between nonconformist and conformist elements in the Elizabethan church which had begun in 1565.

The concept of 'radical Puritanism' was popularised in the twentieth century by scholars intent on investigating groups that earlier commentators tended to call the 'sects' or 'dissenters' of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Until then, the study of these sects remained largely the preserve of denominational chroniclers; the early historians who pioneered the scientific study of English history showed little interest in the subject. These attitudes began to shift in the twentieth century, as new generations of scholars, fascinated by the apparently transformative and democratic political forces unleashed by the English Civil Wars, reconfigured Puritanism as a radical, or even revolutionary, ideology. In the post-war period, particular attention was often focused on the sectaries - separatists, Anabaptists, Fifth Monarchists and others - who played an indisputable role in what was increasingly described as an 'English Revolution'. Often (although not always) these sectarian forms of religion were assimilated under the rubric of 'radical Puritanism', understood as a synonym for what one historian termed 'Left-wing Puritan sects'. Given this presumed analogy between sectarianism and modern forms of left-wing political agitation, it should come as no surprise that the study of radical religion reached its apogee in the early 1970s, culminating most spectacularly in the work of the Marxist historians A. L. Morton and Christopher Hill. Morton and Hill presented the world of Civil-War sectarian Puritanism as a revolutionary counter-culture, created by the marginal people of early modern society, and aimed at transforming the existing social order.

An anonymous newspaper friend once called Kate Chopin 'a rogue in porcelain, flashing her witty, provocative and advanced opinions right into the face of Philistia'. Others noted Chopin's quiet manner and her gift for saying 'so many good and witty things'. She possessed 'every grace and talent essential to the maintenance of a brilliant social circle'. She was wise and cosmopolitan and did not make moral judgements. Nor did she force her own children, five sons and a daughter, to leave home or get jobs, and only one was married before his mother died at fifty-four. She deliberately kept a condemned book, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, on her parlour table so that young visitors would peruse it out of curiosity and discover that it was 'unpardonably dull; and immoral, chiefly because it is not true' (714). Real life and mixed emotions were much more interesting to her than Hardy's melancholy story. According to her daughter, Chopin had a 'habit of looking on the amusing side of everything', but also 'rather a sad nature'. She knew that life has both beauty and brutality - and she also knew how to keep secrets. The facts of Kate O'Flaherty Chopin's life are well known. Although her tombstone lists her birthdate as 1851, her baptismal record shows that she was born on 8 February 1850, in St Louis, Missouri. She was the second child and first daughter of Eliza Faris O'Flaherty, twenty-two, whose husband was Thomas O'Flaherty, forty-five, an Irish immigrant and wealthy businessman who owned four household slaves. Kate had an older brother, an older halfbrother and two little sisters who died young, which may be why, at five, she was sent to boarding school at the Sacred Heart Academy.