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Puritan Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Piety

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Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World

Abstract

The subject of this chapter is the overlap between the traditions which the English-speaking world called Puritanism and those which Continental Protestants called Pietism. The connection is a close one, so much so that F. Ernest Stoeffler has written of ‘Pietistic Puritanism’.1 In their efforts to purify the ecclesiastical and social domains, the Puritans prioritised piety, whatever their reasons for that priority may have been. Indeed, while their views of the church could vary greatly, it was their encouragement of piety which united them.2 The term ‘Pietistic Puritanism’ also offers a precise description of the practice of seventeenth-century Dutch translators and readers, who were all but exclusively interested in the piety of Puritan authors rather than in those authors’ opinions of church matters.3

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Notes

  1. F. Ernest Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1965), 24–108.

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  2. For Alec Ryrie, these commonalities in piety are a reason that we should speak not in terms of (ecclesiologically defined) Puritans, but more generally of Protestants: Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013).

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© 2016 Willem J. op’t Hof

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op’t Hof, W.J. (2016). Puritan Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Piety. In: Ryrie, A., Schwanda, T. (eds) Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490988_10

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