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Puritanism is a highly sophisticated system of thought owing much to Calvinism and Biblical analogy but also to the English literary and common law traditions. David Hollinger, a contemporary American historian observes that the outpouring of scholarship on American Puritanism in the last fifty years has taught us to marvel at the highly articulated intellectuality of Puritan culture in both Old and New England. The Puritans were enthusiastic inheritors not only of Christian and biblical scholarship, but also of the new learning and culture of Renaissance humanism. From both sources they took materials that they strenuously manipulated in order to achieve the highest cultural goal of the religious intellectual: a justification of the ways of God to man and woman. Out of this striving came a complex synthesis of supernatural, rationalistic, and emotional elements that has remained a powerful influence in American intellectual life down to the present.
At the heart of the Puritan synthesis is the idea of the covenant. This was a concept, developed first by late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century continental and English reformed theologians, that defined the relationship between God and humankind as being based on a covenant--a series of divinely ordained yet understandable rules and mutual responsibilities. The covenant or federal idea had wide-ranging applicability. John Winthrop in his sermon on Christian charity used the concept both to expound a complete theory of political authority and social relations and to explain the world-historical significance of the entire New England venture.
The name Puritan derives from the objective of the Puritan party, that of purifying the Church of England, one of the Reformed churches of sixteenth century Europe, of what the Puritan party regarded as vestiges of medieval and feudal Catholicism.
Finding themselves in a state of perpetual dissent during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, the Puritans bided their time and hoped for a better day. They constituted an interesting and diverse group of people whose lives and fortunes were tied more to the modern than to the old era. They tended to be urban, middle- class or skilled artisans, practitioners of the common law (as opposed to practitioners in Royal Prerogative courts). They were frequently involved in navigation and trade. In 1625 they would be faced with the ascension to the throne of Charles I, profoundly anti-Puritan in his attitudes and program. Thus, early in the seventeenth century, some Puritans began to explore their alternatives: Separatism, Revolution, exile, or the New England way. Hence Massachusetts Bay.
That portion of British North America that we now call New England had been granted to the Plymouth Company, a joint stock company, by King James I in 1606. Colonies were being planted as early as 1607, but these were quickly abandoned. By 1620 all that remained in New England were a few isolated fishing villages. In that year a new charter conveyed to the New England Council, the successor to the Plymouth Company, all the territory in North America between latitudes 40 and 48 degrees north. In this same year, the first permanent settlement of New England was made at Plymouth by a small group of English Separatists known to history as the Pilgrims. It was this group that adopted the Mayflower Compact, the first articles of government in British America.
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