Hunter Powell. The Crisis of British Protestantism

Hunter Powell completed his Ph.D. in 2011 under the supervision of John Morrill at Cambridge University. As he notes in his acknowledgments, he was Morrill’s 117th graduate student (!). This book is the product of his time as a research student at Cambridge, doubtless benefiting greatly from the genial but rigorous supervision of his mentor who has had a profound influence on the way historians have thought about the Puritan Revolution for the past forty years and especially about the importance of using contemporaries’ language and constructs to understand their issues. The focus of the book is on the Dissenting Brethren, the group of five congregational ministers who spent several years in exile in Holland in the 1630s but returned to England in 1640 after which, as members of the Westminster Assembly of Divines and as authors of the Apologeticall Narration, they played a critically important role in events through the 1650s. In Powell’s view “no group in the history of the Puritan Revolution had a more disproportionate impact on the course of events than this vocal minority” (3).

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