| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Theodore Dwight Bozeman. The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Blacklash in Puritanism to 1638. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. 2004. Pp. xv, 349. $49.95.
Theodore Dwight Bozeman, one of a small handful of historians of Puritanism equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic, looks again at the development of this movement from its inception in the disappointments of the Elizabethan Settlement to the antinomian controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. He does not merely recapitulate the now familiar story but seeks a new assessment in the light of recent work, principally by Peter Lake and David Como on the English antinomians in the early Stuart period. For all that the landscape will strike students of Puritanism as familiar in its general contours, this is a work of mature reflection based on a thoughtful and careful reading of many of the principal clerical sources.	1
The first third of the book is an examination of the main thrust of Puritan practical divinity: the attempt by the Elizabethan Presbyterians to create a system of national discipline that would serve to create both a godly people, irrespective of whether they were among God's elect, and, by so doing, a godly nation obedient to the divine law and therefore not subject to visitations of divine wrath. Such a theocratic structure was seen as approximating the primitive righteousness of the apostolic church, and was doubly appealing to its devotees as providing a mechanism for the creation of social stability at a time of rapid demographic growth, rising poverty, and social and geographic mobility.	. . .

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