Papist-Protestant - Puritan: English Religious Taxonomy 1565-1665

Abstract

It is wel knowne ... that in the realme of Ingland at this day, there are three different and opposite bodies of religion that are of the most bulk and that do carry most sway and power, which three bodies are knowne commonly in Ingland by the names of Protestants, Puritanes, and Papists, though the latter two do not acknowledge these names, and for the same cause would I not use them neither, if it were not only for cleerness and brevities sake, for that, as often I have protested, my meaning is not to give offence to any side or partye. The idea for this paper came to me a dozen years ago while re-reading Will Herberg’s Protestant - Catholic - Jew, subtitled ‘An Essay in American Religious Sociology’. Mr Herberg made extensive use of survey data which, of course, are not available to the student of Elizabethan-Stuart England, but some of his most pertinent insights came from his analysis of manners of contemporary American speech. I began at that time to note and classify the ways in which Englishmen of this period described religious beliefs and attitudes. The conviction slowly formed that terminology not only flowed from religious thought and belief but in its turn influenced religious thought.

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