Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America
By Michael Winship
Yale University Press, 351pp, £20/$28
Hold on to your hats. Michael Winship has written one of the finest and most challenging studies of early modern Puritanism – and this in a field replete with gifted scholars.
The prose is excellent, but that’s not the main attraction. Winship’s tour through a “rich, dense, tumultuous history” stands out because of its chronological and geographical reach. One hundred and fifty years and events on both sides of the Atlantic are summarised in 350 pages, and the links (quite the muddle for any scholar to disentangle) between the self-styled godly in Britain and America are explored with great finesse.
