This book straddles a crucial divide in British history, as calls for religious reform and renewal mutated into political revolution. It seeks to bring coherence to a pre-revolutionary historiography that focuses on questions of conformity to and (semi-)separatism from 'the church by law established' and a post-1642 historiography built around a coarse polarity of 'Presbyterian' and 'Independent', and modern notions of religious toleration. This book argues that the fundamental ecclesiological issue in 1638-44 was the question of church power. Once Parliament conceded that ecclesiastical...