Description
Book SynopsisShedding critical new light on the diverse forms of Puritan belief and practice in England, Scotland, and New England, Hall provides a multifaceted account of a cultural movement that judged the Protestant reforms of Elizabeth's reign to be unfinished.
Trade Review"Winner of the Philip Schaff Prize, American Society of Church History"
"Mr. Hall’s magisterial work provides a ground-breaking international history of this controversial religious movement as it emerged in the Old World and evolved to shape the New. . . . His voluminous endnotes compress many decades of wide reading into what will become one of the definitive histories of its subject."
---Crawford Gribben, Wall Street Journal"[
The Puritans] guides us steadily, lucidly and authoritatively across a huge landscape of place and time."
---Blair Worden, Literary Review"This book engages deeply with religious politics and theology, serving as a fitting companion to Diarmaid MacCulloch's more broadly conceived
The Reformation: A History (2003)."
---Carla Gardina Pestana, History Today"Hall’s book is a fine-grained synthesis of wide scholarship, suffused with all the supranational dynamism of Atlantic history."
---Malcolm Gaskill, London Review of Books"This book is thoughtful, thorough, accessible, and immensely learned. . . . If you were looking for an authoritative, sympathetic, and absorbing theological history to while away this strange year, you have found it."
---Dr Alec Ryrie, Church Times"There is a retrospective flavour to the book, and something of an elegiac flavour too, particularly in its closing chapters, as it traces the long slow decay of the Puritan tradition."
---Arnold Hunt, Times Literary Supplement"The beauty of it all is that Hall maintains a careful balance between bone-dry dogmas and scholarly wrangling on the one hand and his sympathetic attention to the lived religion of the common people on the other. . . . A ‘must read’ for anyone interested in this fascinating period."
---Reiner Smolinski, ALH Online Review"Hall provides an in-depth and erudite study that scholars will find quite useful . . . . A well-researched study of the Puritans."
---Kirkus Reviews"[Hall] has arguably shaped the field of early American religious history more than any other scholar over the past half-century, contributing key studies in American Puritanism, popular religion, and print culture, among many others.
The Puritans is a culmination of his work and achieves the unique breadth and erudition of a seasoned scholar. . . . It is, however, no stagnant summation but a robust historiographical advancement."
---Ryan Hoselton, Themelios"Hall has written a clear and informative guide to Puritan theology and its implications. . . . To read this book is to gain a much better sense of who [the Puritans] were and why they are so important."
---Norman Jones, Anglican and Episcopal History"The most ambitious of all the works by this distinguished scholar, this book serves as a capstone to his career to date."
---Francis J. Bremer, Journal of Ecclesiastical History"In short, Hall's volume surely ought to be considered the best scholarly history of Puritanism available today."
---Matthew Payne, The Global Anglican"In [David Hall’s] new, masterful overview of transatlantic Puritanism, theology is returned to its rightful place at the head of the conversation."
---Abram C. Van Engen, Journal of Early American History"[An] expert account of why the Puritans have been considered so central to early modern political and socio-cultural history on both sides of the Atlantic, and it shows an understanding of these debates that only a career-long study of the primary sources and decades-worth of scholarship can bring. . . . [The] insights that it offers by drawing the transatlantic strands of Puritanism together will continue to enrich the debate about what Puritanism means."
---Mary Morrissey, Renaissance and Reformation"This book is a monumental piece of scholarship that could only have been completed by an author with a lifetime’s research under their belt. While readers with particular expertise may wish for greater detail in specific areas, Hall’s book offers the most wide-ranging account of the Puritans’ world to date."
---R. Scott Spurlock, Journal of British Studies"Magnificent and profound. . . nothing less than a masterpiece."
---Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Amerikastudien
