Puritans Research Paper

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2. Who were the Puritans? What do your readings tell you about their values and their priorities, religious, economic, and political? The Puritans were a group of English Reformed Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England from all Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England was only partially reformed. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some of the returning clergy exiled under Mary I shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England. Historically, the word 'Puritan' was used pejoratively to characterize the Protestant group as extremists, similar to the Cathars of France and, according to Thomas Fuller in his Church History, dated back to 1564. Archbishop Matthew Parker of that time used it and 'precisian'…show more content…
In this sense, the term "Puritan" was coined in the 1560s, when it first appeared as a term of abuse for those who found the Elizabethan Religious Settlement of 1559 inadequate. Although both Separatists and Puritans sought a holy life close to God, the term Puritan was not intended to refer to an excessively strict morality as the name is often misinterpreted today, but to attempts to reform or purify the established churches. The word "Puritan" was applied unevenly to a number of Protestant churches from the late 16th century onwards. Puritans did not originally use the term for themselves. The practitioners knew themselves as members of particular churches or movements, and not by a single term. "Precisemen" and "Precisians" were other early derogatory terms for Puritans, who preferred to call themselves "the godly". The 17th century English Puritan preacher Thomas Watson used "the godly" to describe Puritans in the title of one of his more famous

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