The first Puritans weren’t so much killjoys as ardent believers in honest living

‘Puritan’ is a term of abuse, and we tend to use it to refer to such figures as the nightmarishly moralistic, sour-faced women who force Hester Prynne to be emblazoned with the Scarlet Letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel. But David D. Hall, doyen of 17th-century puritanism, goes deeper than this. His history is not so much one of ranters as of honest men and women trying to get right the most fundamental things of all: the human relationship with God, and hence the right way to be living and the right sort of society to be ordering. It is these basic questions, as he shows over and over again, which determined the pattern of the Puritans’ behaviour in the early stages of the Reformation, in Scotland and in England. Then, as they drew away from, or were driven out of, the Church of England, in their subsequent life as British nonconformists or as Americans.