ABSTRACT
In The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), Patrick Collinson taught a generation of historians about divisions within the protestant movement between those satisfied with the Elizabethan Settlement of religion and those who thought that it had not gone far enough in a protestant direction. Under Elizabeth, the Church of England took a via media, or middle way, between Catholicism and radical protestantism. It retained the episcopal polity and liturgical worship of the medieval Church, but adopted a thoroughly Protestant doctrine of grace, an evangelical emphasis on preaching that doctrine, and encouragement of English Bible-reading by the laity. Those dissatisfied with the extent of these changes, called by their enemies ‘puritans’, wanted elimination of all ‘popish superstitions’, from worship (the sign of the cross and the wearing of clerical vestments, for example), greater stress on the sermon, and in some cases, replacement of bishops with a presbyterian form of church government.
