Many historical topics have generated huge quantities of scholarly energy. The fall of the Roman Empire, the European Renaissance and Reformations, the rise of nation states in Europe, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the American Civil War, the causes of World War I, and the Holocaust quickly spring to mind. If we think of such subjects as mountain ranges, these belong in the Himalayan category, and Puritanism is certainly among them as well. David Hall's book is a deeply informed, highly nuanced masterpiece, and anyone seeking a wise, sure-footed guide among the Puritan peaks should begin with this fascinating volume. It is required reading not only for new students but also for the many veterans such as this reviewer who have for decades applied themselves to understanding the Puritan movement from its inception in the mid-sixteenth century until its demise late in the seventeenth.

At 356 pages of text and 133 of footnotes, it is weighty but reads smoothly because Hall's writing is precise, clear, and engaging. He often captures a key idea in vivid prose. For example, he says that the early Puritans thought of the published homilies issued under Edward VI and his stepsister Elizabeth as “pebbles cast into a sea of spiritual darkness” (44). As for Elizabeth: “famously, the queen said no to the men who wanted to marry her. The no that resonates in this book is hers to a further reformation. . . . Enter the Puritan movement” (45). Although he does not quote Conrad Russell on this point, he here aligns himself with Russell's perceptive dictum that “the diagnostic sign of a Parliamentarian is [Simonds] D'Ewes's belief that Queen Elizabeth ‘rather settled a beginning of a Reformation than a Reformation” (The Causes of the English Civil War [1990], 20). Hall's way of putting this is that the Elizabethan Puritans thought of her settlement as “a way station on a journey that would conclude when the state church had become emphatically Protestant” (44).

One of the many virtues of Hall's approach is that, instead of remaining in one of two separate silos (Reformation in England and Scotland), he considers “them side by side as companions who share the same project” (4), and then shows how and why, despite their commonalities, they not only went in different directions but developed particular fissures within themselves. The third silo he successfully connects to the other two is the version of Puritanism that initially emerged in New England in the 1630s. The welcome result is to enable his readers to gain new insights into the political dynamics that at times brought the Reformers together and at other times divided them. Proponents of all three of these Puritan movements shared, among other features, a fierce opposition to what they saw as the idolatry and superstition of Roman Catholic worship, an apocalyptic outlook combined with emphasis on divine providence, and an insistence on “an evangelical and social activism predicated on transforming self, church, and society into a ‘new order’ approximating the kingdom of Christ” (24).

Hall attends intently to the presence of Puritan Reformers in each of the three venues who were ready “to blur the hard edges of reform” rather than demand open resistance to the monarchs they had to contend with such as Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts (38). His sensitive presentation of the situation of Puritans in Scotland and England under those monarchs whose policies left a door (or at least a small window) open to the moderates to pursue their goals by making certain compromises then gives way to his exposition of the new and threatening situation they faced beginning with Charles I's tilt toward Laudianism in the mid-1620s. As Hall puts it, “the more Charles expanded on what his father had begun, the more he undermined each of the assumptions that had enabled moderates in the three states to downplay ‘conscience’ and endure the ‘old non-conformity’”(205). The outcome was rebellion, first in Scotland in 1637 and then in England in 1642. Hall's account of the 1640s and 1650s completes his masterful and enlightening survey.