Christopher Durston

Introduction: The Puritan Ethos, 1560–1700

Attempts to define early-modern English ‘puritanism’ and to agree on a common usage for the noun and adjective ‘puritan’ have been going on for well over 400 years. Contemporaries set about the task almost as soon as the religious phenomenon made its appearance in the wake of the sixteenth-century Reformation crisis, and historians and other scholars have continued their efforts, generating a lively academic controversy which shows no sign of abating. The central reason why the debate has gone on for so long is that it has proved exceptionally difficult to reach any common ground. Tudor and Stuart commentators frequently engaged in bitter and unresolved disputes about who or what should be labelled puritan, and historians from Clarendon onwards often seem only to have emulated them. As a consequence, for all the impressive scholarly attention directed to the question since the late sixteenth century, the meaning of the word ‘puritan’ remains unclear and the precise nature of early-modern ‘puritanism’ continues to evade analysis. In a colourful acknowledgement of the confusion and sterility which has marked much of the historiography of puritanism, Patrick Collinson has likened it to ‘a debate conducted among a group of blindfolded scholars in a darkened room about the shape and other attributes of the elephant sharing the room with them’.1

Edward fisher and the defence of Elizabethan protestantism during the English revolution

During the seventeenth century several attempts were made to change fundamentally the character of the Church of England founded by Elizabeth I. The innovations introduced by Laud in the 1630s precipitated a civil war and brought to power godly governments which restructured the Church on a Presbyterian model. The amateur theologian, Edward Fisher, opposed this new godly establishment, arguing for the continued celebration of Christmas, and against sabbatarianism and sacramental examination and suspension. His tracts in support of ‘Elizabethan Protestantism’ proved popular in the 1650s and helped to cement attachment to a more inclusive vision of the English Church.