ABSTRACT
Separatism is a word used to label a tendency of some radical Protestants to break away from the national Church and form their own separate congregations of believers. At one time, some historians confused radical Puritans with Separatists, and saw them both as part of the same dissenting tradition. For them, there was a direct line of descent from Elizabethan Puritans, to the religious exiles on the Mayflower, down to the midseventeenth-century radical sects. Such historians could therefore detect and describe many examples of Separatism in the late Elizabethan period.
