3 Review(s)

Under Cromwell Puritanism had dominated the whole of English life. With his death and the collapse of the Commonwealth there was an immediate change. In this 1957 work, Dr Cragg has written a detailed history of Puritanism in this period. He begins with a general historical study of the political background of religious persecution. He then illustrates the ways in which pressure was exerted and the motives for it; he shows that ideological persecution has changed little. The last chapter summarises the situation on eve of toleration. This is a scholarly work; but it will be read by many who are not historians because the issues which it discusses are not dead, because it is the kind of history in which the reader feels himself invoked in the stress of the conflict, and because men like Baxter and Bunyan come alive in writings which Dr Cragg knows well and quotes richly.