What has by convention been called 'John Lightfoot's journal' is in fact a four-volume series of journals, the first of which has never been published. The journals are presented here in their entirety for the first time. John Lightfoot's journals cover a period in the author's life when he was a member of the famous 'assembly of divines' meeting in Westminster Abbey. The Westminster assembly (1643-1653) was comprised of approximately thirty members of parliament and 120 ministers. By the outbreak of the war in England in 1642, a majority in the Long Parliament had come to see it as its duty to renovate the Church of England, both bringing it into line with a more biblical code and up to date with the best Reformed Churches. Lightfoot's personal diary is of critical importance to assembly history because his meticulous little volumes supply the only account of the assembly's activities for sessions 1-44, and the only fulsome account for sessions 120-154, where the assembly's own minutes are missing. For the sessions where the assembly's minutes are extant, Lightfoot offers another set of eyes, often supplying additional information and a perspective differing from the assembly's own scribe. These sessions record the gathering's opening ceremonies, surprising fractious debates over the Thirty-nine Articles, and predictably heated conflicts between Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists over church governance. Lightfoot describes riots outside parliament, names meeting places for MPs and assembly members in London, and attempts to explain assembly dynamics in a way that The Minutes and Papers of the assembly do not. The four-volume journal ends abruptly after eighteen months, in December 1644. The body of this volume contains the full text of Lightfoot's surviving journals, accompanied by interpretive introductions for each session and editorial notation throughout. The introduction sets in context the author's life prior to and during the Westminster assembly and discusses the careful composition, potential audience, and checkered transmission of the journals.

Between 1640 and 1660, England, Scotland, and Ireland faced civil war, invasion, religious radicalism, parliamentary rule, and the restoration of the monarchy. Carla Gardina Pestana offers a sweeping history that systematically connects these cataclysmic events and the development of the infant plantations from Newfoundland to Surinam. By 1660, the English Atlantic emerged as religiously polarized, economically interconnected, socially exploitative, and ideologically anxious about its liberties. War increased both the proportion of unfree laborers and ethnic diversity in the settlements. Neglected by London, the colonies quickly developed trade networks, especially from seafaring New England, and entered the slave trade. Barbadian planters in particular moved decisively toward slavery as their premier labor system, leading the way toward its adoption elsewhere. When by the 1650s the governing authorities tried to impose their vision of an integrated empire, the colonists claimed the rights of "freeborn English men," making a bid for liberties that had enormous implications for the rise in both involuntary servitude and slavery. Changes at home politicized religion in the Atlantic world and introduced witchcraft prosecutions. Pestana presents a compelling case for rethinking our assumptions about empire and colonialism and offers an invaluable look at the creation of the English Atlantic world.

The Making of Peace represents a unique contribution to the study of war: namely, the difficulties that statesman have confronted in attempting to put back together the pieces after a major conflict. It contains a number of case studies by many leading historians in the United States and the United Kingdom.

By their very nature, traditions are diverse. This is particularly the case with theological traditions, even including those cases where they have been named for a single individual (e.g. Augustinianism, Thomism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism). In the eras of the Reformation and of Reformed orthodoxy there was intense theological debate, leading to confessional identity and confessional boundaries; hence the Remonstrant controversy in the early seventeenth century. What the essays of this volume look at, however, are the debates that took place within the Reformed theological tradition, particularly within Puritan England. Some of the debates considered here threatened to rise to a confessional level whereas others were not so serious insofar as they did not press on confessional boundaries. The Puritan tradition surveyed in these essays looks at both major and minor intra-Reformed debates. Most of these debates analyzed have been passed over in the older scholarship in its quest to find the few true Calvinians to oppose to the so-called Calvinists. By contrast, none of the studies included in the present volume brands one side of a seventeenth-century debate as un-Calvinian or identifies an alteration of doctrinal perspective as a declension from Reformation-era purity. Calvin no longer appears as a norm, although he does appear, with other Reformers, as an antecedent of certain lines of argument. Lastly, the essays document the ongoing concern among Reformed theologians to further the Reformation cause. In this pursuit, Reformed theologians, as they did during the time of the Reformation theologians, often found themselves disagreeing on a number of theological doctrines.

The Puritan Ideology of Mobility: Corporatism, the Politics of Place, and the Founding of New England Towns before 1650 examines the ideology that English Puritans developed to justify migration: their migration from England to New England, migrations from one town to another within New England, and, often, their repatriation to the mother country. Puritan leaders believed firmly that nations, colonies, and towns were all “bodies politic,” that is, living and organic social bodies. However, if a social body became distempered because of scarce resources or political or religious discord, it became necessary to create a new social body from the old in order to restore balance and harmony. The new social body was articulated through the social ritual of land distribution according to Aristotelian “distributive justice.” The book will trace this process at work in the founding of Ipswich and its satellite town in Massachusetts.