Puritanism

One of the little inconsistencies of modern Western popular culture and history is that ‘the Reformation’ is broadly viewed as a Good Thing; but Puritanism, one of its most purebred offspring, is unquestionably a Bad Thing. The need to deal with those twin perceptions determines the shape of these two books in Oxford University Press's Very Short Introductions series. Unlike early modern publishers, who were perfectly capable of calling a brick-sized book ‘brief’, OUP are not joking. These are tiny books, octavos which are literally pocket-sized, with scarcely more than a hundred pages of small print. (A little too small for my eyes, but these books are intended for students who are mostly younger than me.) The remit is to provide a clear overview of a subject for the intelligent beginner. In both cases the authors succeed admirably. Francis J. Bremer has the more straightforward task. ‘Puritan’ was first coined as a term of abuse and it remains one today. All scholars of the subject know that the stereotypical Puritan—the hypocritical, repressed, small-minded killjoy and busybody—is a gross caricature; they also know that the caricature is not entirely groundless. They may be tempted to remind us that Puritanism had other features which are more attractive to the modern world: its commitment to liberty and equality, to education, and to supporting community and family life, to say nothing of its raw courage. But, although Bremer's sympathy for the Puritan tradition is clear, he is too good a historian to allow this book to become an apologia. Like all historical phenomena, it is neither so much a Good Thing nor a Bad Thing as its own thing. He gives us a thorough, rounded account of the movement's origin and development, and manages to smuggle in some of the scholarly debates around it in the process. He has a particular interest in American Puritanism, but the English story is given full treatment too (Ireland and Scotland are not). The result is a book which could be recommended to any student

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