To Live Ancient Lives signals a sharp redirection of Puritan
studies. It provides the first comprehensive study of Puritan
primitivism, defined as the drive to recover and return to church
and society the ordinances of biblical times. This work traces a
campaign to purify English Christianity of postapostolic accretions
from the Henrician Reformation to the Great Migration of 1630 and
through the first five decades in New England.
Taking their bearings from a special past, Puritans were not
concerned with the future in a modern sense. The Great Migration
was not intended as an errand to reform the world or inaugurate the
millennium, but as a flight to a free world in which long-lost
biblical rules and ways could be reinstituted.
Drawing on hundreds of sermons and tracts, Bozeman demonstrates how
the search for the long-lost helps to identify Puritanism as a
discrete order within Protestant dissent, and he locates that
movement within the larger spectrum of restorationist Christian
movements and of Western mythology.
Originally published in 1988.
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