Godly Republicanism ─ Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill

Winship (history, U. of Georgia) explores the government and ecclesiastical republicanism, created by the Puritans in Massachusetts in the 1630s, of twinned religious and civic institutions, which were both formed in ways that were intended to invest greater power in, respectively, the laity and the people. He begins his narrative in England, presenting chapters examining the role of Elizabethan radical puritans in connecting their republican church forms to the project of national reformation, the common origins of Elizabethan separatism and Presbyterianism and their later divergence in forms of church governance, and the responses of the separatists and the Presbyterians to the hostility of James I. He then crosses the Atlantic and discusses the long-term impact of the separatist Plymouth colony on religious and civic governance in Massachusetts, before returning to England and considering the influence of this Atlantic republican tradition on mid-17th-century English religious and political upheavals. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Michael P. Winship is E. Merton Coulter Professor of History, at the University of Georgia.