Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill [Hardcover]

Puritans did not find a life free from tyranny in the New Worldthey created it there. Massachusetts emerged a republic as they hammered out a vision of popular participation and limited government in church and state, spurred by Plymouth Pilgrims. Godly Republicanism underscores how pathbreaking yet rooted in puritanisms history the project was.

Michael Winship takes us first to England, where he uncovers the roots of the puritans republican ideals in the aspirations and struggles of Elizabethan Presbyterians. Faced with the twin tyrannies of Catholicism and the crown, Presbyterians turned to the ancient New Testament churches for guidance. What they discovered therewhether it existed or notwas a republican structure that suggested better models for governing than monarchy.

The puritans took their ideals to Massachusetts, but they did not forge their godly republic alone. In this book, for the first time, the separatists contentious, creative interaction with the puritans is given its due. Winship looks at the emergence of separatism and puritanism from shared origins in Elizabethan England, considers their split, and narrates the story of their reunion in Massachusetts. Out of the encounter between the separatist Plymouth Pilgrims and the puritans of Massachusetts Bay arose Massachusetts Congregationalism.

Every reader will gain important new knowledge of New Englands religious and political origins from Michael P. Winships lively, ambitious, and impressively scholarly book& Winships masterful book will surely be read by everyone interested in New Englands or Americas origins.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 generations finest scholars of puritanism.[A] meticulously researched argument for the distinctly republican character of early New England& The book lS8