Transatlantic Puritanism and American Singularities
The taunting question posed in the 1820s by the English critic Sidney Smith, ‘Who reads an American book?’, has long since tumbled into the dustbin of literary history. Yet it continues to reverberate in how Americanists describe the workings of Puritanism in their own country, its presence felt in...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
[2017]
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| In: |
The journal of ecclesiastical history
Year: 2017, Volume: 68, Issue: 1, Pages: 113-122 |
| Review of: | Lay empowerment and the development of Puritanism (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) (Hall, David D.)
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| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
New England
/ Great Britain
/ Puritanism
/ History 1600-1700
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| IxTheo Classification: | KAH Church history 1648-1913; modern history KBF British Isles KBQ North America KDD Protestant Church |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | The taunting question posed in the 1820s by the English critic Sidney Smith, ‘Who reads an American book?’, has long since tumbled into the dustbin of literary history. Yet it continues to reverberate in how Americanists describe the workings of Puritanism in their own country, its presence felt in two respects. One of these is resentment at the indifference to their own work of historians of the Puritan movement in Britain. Another is the assumption among Americanists that the Puritanism of the colonists who arrived in the early seventeenth century was singular in certain respects, be it their sense of ‘errand’, their modifications of Reformed orthodoxy, or perhaps their daring experiment with a congregation-centred polity, the ‘New England Way’. Whenever historians turn to the larger project of Church and State in colonial and modern America, assertions of singularity dominate the telling of our religious history. Do these endeavours warrant returning to Sidney Smith's question and rephrasing it to ask whether Americanists are making the most of European studies of Reformed theology, Puritanism in Britain, and conformity or dissent? |
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| ISSN: | 1469-7637 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The journal of ecclesiastical history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0022046916000610 |