What They Left Behind: The English Politics the Puritans Rejected, with David Hall

Watch Harvard Divinity School's David Hall's brilliant lecture charting the reasons for New England's Puritans rejection of their social and political past - from deep inequality to bishops and royal prerogative. Given at Suffolk University, September 24, 2024.
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We take for granted the town meetings and elected officers of early Massachusetts, as well as its laws proclaiming individual rights and liberties for most free white men. But the Puritans in England could not.
In fact, in England these would have been seen dangerously radical - innovations anathema in a polity ruled largely by royal decree and marked by hierarchy and arbitrary rule, and liberties to which no ordinary person was entitled.
In this first of the Partnership of Historic Bostons 2024 fall lecture series, Tyrannies & Liberties: Politics in 17th Century New England, David Hall, author of numerous books on the Puritans, explores the politics, beliefs and practices New England Puritans tossed overboard when they departed English shores for their new lives. His opening lecture offered an essential window onto the radicalism of these Puritans in the 17th century English context and their rejection of what many saw as the tyranny of both church and state. At the heart of their new society was their commitment to the covenant: a belief that they would be bound together by Christian love - and therefore care for each other in a radical new society marked by land distribution, rule of law, politicians who stepped down after electoral defeat, and no taxation without representation. Starting with the Scottish Reformation, David Hall charts the ways the Puritans, without an explicit blueprint, created a society more equal than any other in the English colonial world.
Video + Stream provided by K. Greene Productions