Godly republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill

Paul Harvey

Here's a great looking new title that should interest a lot of you, with short review from Choice. Anyone else who has looked at the book, feel free to chime in, I have yet to see it.

Winship, Michael P.  Godly republicanism: Puritans, pilgrims, and a city on a hill.  Harvard, 2012.  339p index afp; ISBN9780674063853, $49.95. Reviewed in 2012oct CHOICE.

In this panoramic revisionist effort covering decades of Puritan historiography, Winship (Georgia) begins by investigating notions of the proper bond between civil and religious government current during the Tudor era. He segues into the first decades of the Jacobean period and reexamines the church-state relationship described in Puritan studies, from Perry Miller's classics of 80 years ago to the research of a dozen leading scholars writing from the 1950s to the present. Recent investigations by Darren Staloff (The Making of an American Thinking Class, CH, Jun'98, 35-5854) and David D. Hall (A Reforming People, CH, Dec'11, 49-2266) provide underpinning for Winship, but his is a stunningly original piece of scholarship that reinterprets the origins of Massachusetts Bay's congregational practice using both the tracts and sermons of early-day Puritan separatists and the later examples provided by the settlements at Plymouth and Salem. Only time will reveal how many of the author's conclusions will be accepted by historians, but whatever its fate, this book is an impressive piece of scholarship. The new picture of early English and American politico-religious thought it provides is complex, densely argued, and quite persuasive. Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates and above. -- B. R. Burg, Arizona State University