\'Puritan\' was originally a term of contempt, and \'Puritanism\' has often been stereotyped by critics and admirers alike.
This Companion broadens our understanding of Puritanism, showing how.
But it was never monolithic or purely oppositional, and its impact reverberated far beyond seventeenth-century England and New England.
As a distinctive and particularly intense variety of early modern Reformed Protestantism, it was a product of acute tensions within the post-Reformation Church of England. \'Puritan\' was originally a term of contempt, and \'Puritanism\' has often been stereotyped by critics and admirers alike