Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600-1800

For many English puritans, the new world represented new opportunities for the reification of reformation, if not a site within which they might begin to experience the conditions of the millennium itself. For many Irish Catholics, by contrast, the new world became associated with the experience of defeat, forced transportation, indentured service, cultural and religious loss. And yet, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the Atlantic experience of puritans and Catholics could be much less bifurcated than some of the established scholarly narratives have suggested: puritans and Catholics could co-exist within the same trans-Atlantic families; Catholics could prosper, just as puritans could experience financial decline; and Catholics and puritans could adopt, and exchange, similar kinds of belief structures and practical arrangements, even to the extent of being mistaken for each other. This volume investigates the history of Puritans and Catholics in the Atlantic world, 1600-1800.

For many English puritans, the new world represented new opportunities for the reification of reformation, if not a site within which they might begin to experience the conditions of the millennium itself. For many Irish Catholics, by contrast, the new world became associated with the experience of defeat, forced transportation, indentured service, cultural and religious loss. And yet, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the Atlantic experience of puritans and Catholics could be much less bifurcated than some of the established scholarly narratives have suggested: puritans and Catholics could co-exist within the same trans-Atlantic families; Catholics could prosper, just as puritans could experience financial decline; and Catholics and puritans could adopt, and exchange, similar kinds of belief structures and practical arrangements, even to the extent of being mistaken for each other. This volume investigates the history of Puritans and Catholics in the Atlantic world, 1600-1800.

1 Introduction; Crawford Gribben.- 2 Families and Religious Conflict in the Early Modern Atlantic World; Francis J. Bremer.- 3 Catholics in a Puritan Atlantic: The Liminality of Empire’s Edge; R. Scott Spurlock.- 4 Catholic and Puritan Conspiracies in Samuel Ward’s The Double Deliverance (1621); Ema Vyroubalová.- 5 Spiritual Treason and the Politics of Intercession: Presbyterians, Laudians and the Church of England; Polly Ha.- 6 Straining the Bonds of Puritanism: English Presbyterians and Massachusetts Congregationalists Debate Ecclesiology, 1636–40; Michael P. Winship.- 7 The Jewish Indian Theory and Protestant Use of Catholic Thought in the Early Modern Atlantic; Andrew Crome.- 8 Reformation and the Wickedness of Port Royal, Jamaica, 1655– c .1692; David Manning.- 9 Cotton Mather, Heterodox Puritanism, and the Construction of Americ; Edward Simon.- 10 The London Yearly Meeting and Quaker Administrative Innovation in an Atlantic Context; Jordan Landes.- 11 Thinking Like a Presbyterianin 1690s Ireland; Robert Armstrong.- 12 ‘With the Papists They Have Much in Common’: Trans-Atlantic Protestant Communalism and Catholicism, 1700–1850; Philip Lockley.