The Religion of the Protestants by Patrick Collinson

CITATION: Collinson, Patrick. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How can Jacobean-historiographical taxonomies of "Anglican" and "Puritan" be reformed?
• Answer: The Puritan movement was more conservative and consistent with the episcopacy, and Laudians reacted to Calvinist pressures in universities to become the main agitators of religious discourse prior to the Civil War.
• Method: Collinson focuses on the social, not theological, formation of English Protestantism. He nearly disregards high philosophy in favor of institutional practices.
• Assumptions: Collinson responds to two related streams of criticism: one which attributes the Civil War to Puritan anti-ecclesiastical tumult; another, championed by Christopher Hill, which treats the Puritans as necessary and inevitable precursors to revolutionary socialists.
• Sententiae: "So the protestant governing class progressed from the Elizabethan demand for a new religious order to the Jacobean enjoyment of such an order, already partly achieved. And when in the reign of Charles I that order appeared in danger of overthrow by a new conjunction of the forces which had never ceased to threaten it, the recation was defensive and conservative. But whether in assertion or defence, the animating spirit was not one of disobedience or ill-affection but of a profound veneration for order and a strong disposition towards obedience: the double need to objey God and his earthly representatives, and in turn to exact the obedience due from inferiors." (153)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Collinson's argument is persuasive and edifying for my Puritanical tendencies.
  Lastly, I won't lie: I had a long, hard time with this book. The evidence is too far removed from my main interests, and the argument seems far removed from present discourses. What one reviewer called "his distaste for literary organization" obfuscates the structure of Collinson's lectures.
• Synthesis: I'm having trouble conceiving how Knapp related his research to Collinson's, at least since this work focuses on the Jacobean period. But I suppose that Collinson relocates iconophilia to the insurgent Laudians--and accordingly the iconophobic culture of the Puritans could be related to the dominant ecclesiastical institutions in the Jacobean period.
• Application:It would be interesting to re-examine parodies of academics in the Jacobean period--eg, Love's Labours Lost--for an overtone of institutional cooperation with Puritans.