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Detailed & Readable Portrait of Puritan Colonists, March 25, 2000
This review is from: Mobility and Migration: East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629-1640 (Hardcover)
Roger Thompson examines the English genealogies, biographies and careers of a large sample of Puritan colonists. Thompson finds that most Puritans, before leaving Britain, lived, worked and socialized in the same network of communities in which their ancestors had lived for many generations. Even the merchants, the most mobile group Thompson studies, were only incrementally mobile. Over years, or over generations, merchants moved town-by-town, steadily closer to London. Most Puritan colonists, Thompson asserts, would have found the move to another continent a drastic break from both their heritage and their experience.
The examination of callings, both religious and occupational, proves extremely interesting. Thompson shows how these men and women lived in England, and why they finally felt compelled to leave. Details of their lives, both personal and professional, enrich Thompson's study.
The work is a tremendous contribution to our understanding of the Puritans, in both England and America. Thompson offers a work of outstanding skill and readability.
Other works in the same field would be the section on East Anglians relocating to New England in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, and the entirety of D. (David Grayson) Allen's In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transfer of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay, 1600-1690. Thompson's work is an invaluable contribution to the study of the transatlantic Puritan community.
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