ABSTRACT
Puritanism is almost wholly deficient in imaginative literature and indeed, given its attitude towards life in general, it was hardly likely to produce such a thing. The ultimate sources of this literature are the Bible, the ancient writers and, Erasmus and Bullinger. The historian G. G. Coulton, for instance, once contended that: The puritanism of the Reformation was simply the strictest and most logical attempt yet made to realize certain thoroughly mediaeval ideals; its theory had long been the theory of the religious, but none had yet dared to enforce it wholesale. Puritan writers with their strict adherence to the words of the Bible had, to set their faces against self-glorification and insubordination on the part of women as something un-Christian which accorded neither with the practice of the Old Testament nor with the teaching of St Paul. Thus the Puritan’s method of treating the erotic element in marriage recognized that it had an important part to play.
