Published in 1996: The Book the author produced, A Journall or Diary of a Thankfull Christian is essentially a manual, a how-to book about how to write a spiritual diary; moreover, it is the only one of its kind written in seventeenth-century England.
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.
This is a literary study of the seventeenth-century pamphlets and sermons delivered to the Long Parliament by Stephen Marshall, a leading English Puritan. Marshall was known as preacher to the Long Parliament and for his participation in the further reformation of the English Church in the 1640s. His understanding of the role of civil magistracy was deeply rooted in his concept of the English Reformation. He was convinced that the constitutional changes during the sixteenth-century English Reformation defined the role of civil magistrates. The King became the Supreme Head of the English Church, and the civil magistracy consisting of King-or-Queen-in Parliament had the responsibility to spearhead the reformation of the English Church. He also insisted that restoring godly preaching and teaching in every local church would eventually complete the English Reformation. Marshall also argued that the Henrician schism paved the way for England to become a Christian Commonwealth where the Church is lodged, whose characteristic was the unity among the people of God. This implied that in England, Presbyterians, Independents, and Erastians all belonged to one body of Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church. In a Christian Commonwealth, civil magistracy was a divine institution and had the highest power of ordering and governing the church, according to Marshall. It was the civil magistracys responsibility to protect and to take care of Gods people in all godliness. And in order to do so, magistrates should be rightly informed from the Word of God. Though Marshall showed his opposition to King Charles Is political innovation that precipitated an unfortunate war in 1642, his vision of a Christian Commonwealth where English magistracy consisting of the King-or-Queen-in-Parliament did not change. If the king could be persuaded to agree with the ecclesiastical reform Puritans proposed through Parliament, he would still be an instrument of reform.