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The last four enormously productive decades of the study of pre-Civil War puritanism have been driven by the discovery that, contrary to previous assumptions, puritanism was neither particularly consistent nor easy to distinguish from other tendencies within the penumbra of the Church of England. Indeed, a few scholars even tried to claim that it did not exist. Their efforts stumbled over the undoubted existence of those against whom the epithet 'puritan' was most often hurled. These were the self-styled 'godly', overlapping groups of people who had various degrees of hostility to the existing official arrangements of the Church of England, or were at least comfortable with people who did, and whose overlapping pietistic ambitions were, to a lesser or greater extent, inadequately fulfilled by the official forms of the church. The agendas and even the makeup of these groups were always sensitive to other political and religious developments, and efforts to give puritanism a precise definition, then and now, create an artificial coherence. Puritanism was more a problem generated by the structure of the Church of England than it was a free-standing entity.1 As Patrick Collinson puts it, 'Puritanism was not a thing definable in itself but only one half of a stressful relationship'.2 Recent scholarship has emphasized that puritanism was defined not only by its external, stressful relationship with hostile elements within the Church of England, but also by stressful internal relationships and by relationships that cut across its malleable borders.
Historians have not given Restoration religion nearly the same amount of scholarly attention as the religion of the earlier part of the century. Yet the term 'puritan' continued in sporadic use throughout this period, sometimes as an insult, sometimes as a way to describe the pre-Civil War godly, and sometimes in its original sense as a synonym for Calvinist nonconformity, past or present.3 Nonetheless, when Restoration scholars use the term 'puritan', they tend to employ it in a static, offhand, even perfunctory way, which has little resemblance to the self-conscious, fluid approach of historians of earlier puritanism.
That difference of scholarly approaches can largely be ascribed to the different circumstances of the periods. The Restoration appears to offer a previously missing clarity of identification,...