One Small Candle

Reviewed by: One Small Candle: The Plymouth puritans and the beginning of English New England by Francis J. Bremer Barry Levy One Small Candle: The Plymouth puritans and the beginning of English New England By Francis J. Bremer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. The creation and establishment of a laity-controlled Bible church on American soil was the one small candle of Bremer's title, a phrase he borrows from the Plymouth historian and Governor William Bradford's seventeenth-century description of his community and its historical significance. Bremer and Bradford tell us one church ignited a bonfire, particularly in Massachusetts, that consumed monarchies and nourished new democratic regimes across the world based on the new sacred people's sovereignty. Although written many years apart, Bremer's narrative and Bradford's seventeenth-century eyewitness history coincide, placing the New England transplanted separatist Scrooby church in a significant role in the story of democracy. The spread of printed vernacular Bibles in the sixteenth century, the story goes, threatened to bury kings' authority. In states that accepted vernacular Bible-reading like England, the establishment's design was to supervise and control the spread and interpretation of God's Word through a state church under monarchial and aristocratic control. The Scrooby pilgrims scrapped this plan—the story continues—by making and successfully transplanting to America the mystical body of Christ on earth as a lay controlled church. They spread their church design to later arriving puritans. The Scrooby believers changed history by making the laity both sacred and self-determining. This relatively short book provides the reader with the pleasure of witnessing a legend emerging into academic history via footnotes while keeping the legend's shape and power. Bremer commands the sources superbly to tell his tale of Plymouth preeminence with empathy and quiet confidence. The idols, William Brewster, and William Bradford, emerge as three-dimensional people: intelligent and inspired religious fanatics capable of learning and shrewd politics. Despite lacking church records, Bremer finds evidence to describe the Scrooby separatists' invention of lay control and prophesying and their ability to persuade later arriving puritans in Massachusetts to endorse their form of church government. Prophesyings were organized lay and public discussion of Biblical passages in church on the Sabbath, a key to lay empowerment. Their minister John Robinson having been left in the Netherlands, William Brewster, a university-educated layman, became the pilgrims' religious leader and chief speaker. When ordained ministers did arrive in Plymouth, almost a decade from the first settlement, Bremer shows how the laity selected and controlled them. He also shows how the Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, community's earlier removal to the Netherlands provided contact with different religious radicals and made the Scrooby leaders more adept and flexible handlers of state intrusions into religion. Only Bremer's undocumented assertion that women often spoke in Plymouth prophesying suggests a loss of reality to fantasy. On the other hand, Bremer's description of how the pilgrim fathers helped thousands of the great migration puritans, arriving after 1629, to form churches with lay control and participation is a well-documented, detailed and convincing contribution. The prologue describes the horrifying impact of the first American year. Half the settlers died. Bremer then departs from Bradford's seventeenth-century history by nearly excluding all messy economic realities. The material world supplies the main topics in Bradford's history. Realizing that God's church must live in the real world, Bradford thought the economic mastery of the new world and its economic relations by saints a key to the pilgrims' success, a sign of Divine approval, and a topic worthy of discussion. Bremer includes a chapter on Natives that establishes the pilgrims' ethnocentrism but contains nothing about how Natives provided the pilgrims with most of the technology and knowledge that allowed them to survive in New England, and supplied them with the furs that allowed them to pay their English investors. Bradford does. While celebrating radical religion, Bremer fails to confront the radical egalitarian thought and economic campaign of Bradford and the other pilgrim leaders, including their hesitancy to allow private property within their company and community. Bremer includes virtually no discussion of Plymouth's controversial economic

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