Puritanism and Historical Controversy

Gordon DesBrisay is an assistant professor of history at the University
of Saskatchewan.

Puritanism and Historical Controversy is an engaging study of
17th-century English puritans and what 20th-century scholars have made
of them.

After a brisk introduction, three chapters review the careers and works
of three well-known men who offer a cross-section of puritan opinion:
William Prynne, Ludowicke Muggleton, and Richard Baxter. The book shifts
gear for the remaining five chapters, each a closely argued critique of
a familiar pairing: puritanism and revolution, puritanism and liberty,
puritanism and capitalism, puritanism and millenarianism, and puritanism
and reason (witches and science). Should we, asks Lamont, “imagine any
of our seventeenth-century puritans to be building planks for the future
to walk on?” He answers in the negative, using the writings of Prynne,
Muggleton, and (especially) Baxter to demonstrate how uncomfortably real
puritans fit the conceptual frameworks devised by Max Weber and his
successors.

Senior undergraduates familiar with 17th-century English history will
profit from this book, especially if read in conjunction with the
primary and secondary authors Lamont engages with. By carefully
contextualizing puritanism, Lamont offers students a salutary lesson in
the strangeness of the past: their dilemmas, he reminds us, are not our
dilemmas. He sets a less happy example, however, with insufficient notes
(two chapters simply refer readers to his earlier books, which will not
be in every library), a tendency to quote but not cite contemporary
historians, and an index that lacks “presbyterians” but has room for
Laura Ashley. These irritants aside, this affordable paperback belongs
in every academic library and on many a syllabus.