Contents:
Introduction Part I: Revising Religion 1. The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation Christopher Haigh 2. Protestant Culture and the Cultural Revolution Patrick Collinson 3. Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution Nicholas Tyacke 4. Archbishop Laud Kevin Sharpe 5. Arminianism and the Court 1625-1629 Peter White Part II: Revising Politics 6. Parliament in the Reign of Elizabeth I Geoffrey Elton 7. England in 1637 Conrad Russell 8. The Coming of War John Morrill Part III: Responding to Revisionism 9. The Early Expansion of Protestantism in England A.G. Dickens 10. Calvinism and the English Church 1570-1635 Peter Lake 11. Popular Politics Before the Civil War David Underdown 12. News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-century England Richard Cust 13. Local History and the Origins of the Civil War Ann Hughes

Contents:
Introduction Part I: Revising Religion 1. The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation Christopher Haigh 2. Protestant Culture and the Cultural Revolution Patrick Collinson 3. Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution Nicholas Tyacke 4. Archbishop Laud Kevin Sharpe 5. Arminianism and the Court 1625-1629 Peter White Part II: Revising Politics 6. Parliament in the Reign of Elizabeth I Geoffrey Elton 7. England in 1637 Conrad Russell 8. The Coming of War John Morrill Part III: Responding to Revisionism 9. The Early Expansion of Protestantism in England A.G. Dickens 10. Calvinism and the English Church 1570-1635 Peter Lake 11. Popular Politics Before the Civil War David Underdown 12. News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-century England Richard Cust 13. Local History and the Origins of the Civil War Ann Hughes

The Calvinist Reformation in Scottish towns was a radically transformative movement. It incorporated into urban ecclesiastical governance a group of laymen - the elders of the kirk session - drawn heavily from the crafts guilds as well as wealthy merchants. These men met at least weekly with the minister and comprised a parochial church court that exercised an unprecedented discipline of the lives of the ordinary citizenry. They pried into sexual behaviour, administered the hospital and other poor relief, ordered fostering of orphans, oversaw the grammar school, enforced sabbath observance, investigated charges of witchcraft, arbitrated quarrels and punished people who railed at their neighbours. In times of crisis like the great plague of 1584-85, they rationed food sent from other towns and raised an already high bar on moral discipline to avert further divine wrath. The minute books of Perth's session, established in the 1560s and surviving most fully from 1577, open a window on this religious discipline, the men who administered it, and the lay people who both resisted and facilitated it, negotiating its terms to meet their own agendas. They are presented here with full introduction and explanatory notes. Margo Todd is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.

Traditional views of puritan social thought have done a great injustice to the intellectual history of the sixteenth century. They have presented puritans as creators of a disciplined, progressive, ultimately revolutionary theory of social order. The origins of modern society and politics are laid at the feet of zealous English protestants whose only intellectual debts are owed to Calvinist theology and the Bible. Professor Todd demonstrates that this view is fundamentally ahistorical. She places puritanism back in its own historical milieu, showing puritans as the heirs of a complex intellectual legacy, derived no less from the Renaissance than from the Reformation. The focus is on puritan social thought as part of a sixteenth-century intellectual consensus. This study traces the continuity of Christian humanism in the social thought of English protestants.