ABSTRACT
The Civil War used to be called the ‘Puritan Revolution’. The tendency of historians recently has been to emphasise its social and political causes, sometimes almost to the exclusion of religion. Yet questions of religion and Church government loomed large for contemporaries, even in spheres which today we should not regard as religious at all. Professor Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, which every student of the period should read, suggests that Puritan ways of thought contributed to the development of a capitalist outlook; most historians would agree that there is some connection between the Puritan and the bourgeois virtues. The very idea of a Puritan Revolution is more complex than we used to think.
