To Live Ancient Lives signals a sharp redirection of Puritan studies. It provides the first comprehensive study of Puritan primitivism, defined as the drive to recover and return to church and society the ordinances of biblical times. This work traces a campaign to purify English Christianity of postapostolic accretions from the Henrician Reformation to the Great Migration of 1630 and through the first five decades in New England.

Taking their bearings from a special past, Puritans were not concerned with the future in a modern sense. The Great Migration was not intended as an errand to reform the world or inaugurate the millennium, but as a flight to a free world in which long-lost biblical rules and ways could be reinstituted.

Drawing on hundreds of sermons and tracts, Bozeman demonstrates how the search for the long-lost helps to identify Puritanism as a discrete order within Protestant dissent, and he locates that movement within the larger spectrum of restorationist Christian movements and of Western mythology.

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