But, as Michael Winship argues in this deeply researched book, “historiographical excesses” should not be held against the puritans. They had strong ideas about church polity, and the settlers of New England did envision their congregations functioning as “little republics.”  That belief also shaped their view of the political order.

The scholarly study of the Puritans has been marked in recent years by attempts to understand them in a fully transatlantic context. This follows a broader trend in early American history to focus on “Atlantic world” perspectives, rather than proto-national American ones. While others could view this de-emphasizing of the future United States as ideologically dubious, I think it is a sanguine development for understanding the Puritans in their own places and time.

I have recently written reviews of two books that illustrate the transatlantic study of Puritanism, Michael Winship’s Godly Republicanism, and Francis Bremer’sbiography of New Haven founder John Davenport. At the New England Quarterly [subscription only], I wrote of Winship that

“Whig history” has long since fallen into disfavor among historians, and few academics today would be willing to laud the New England meetinghouse as a laboratory for American democracy. But, as Michael Winship argues in this deeply researched book, “historiographical excesses” should not be held against the puritans. They had strong ideas about church polity, and the settlers of New England did envision their congregations functioning as “little republics.”  That belief also shaped their view of the political order.

The English puritans’ polity was republican in that congregations would elect elders to govern the church. This model stood in stark contrast to the bishop-dominated hierarchy of the Church of England, which remained too “popish” for the puritans’ taste. Winship notes that the puritans’ assumptions of “the dread of the corrupting effects of power, the fear of one-man rule, the emphasis on the consent of the people and on balanced government” were nearly identical to the hallmarks of classical republicanism…

The English Civil War—and the short-lived English republic of the 1650s—represented the greatest moment of potential for the influence of Massachusetts congregationalism and godly republicanism. But with the death of Cromwell the republic foundered, and with the Restoration both godly republicanism and congregationalism fell on hard times. Yet Winship believes that the Reformed penchant for republicanism in church and state lingered in New England and bore fruit in new varieties during the American Revolution.

Godly Republicanism is a bold, searching, and overdue analysis of the nexus between churchly and political government in puritan thought. With this book, Winship has further secured his reputation as one of this generation’s finest scholars of puritanism.

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