The Puritans on Independence sheds light on the rise of new claims by puritans to freedom as "independence" several decades earlier than modern scholarship has assumed. This critical edition of long-lost English manuscripts provides access to a set of treatises which are the most significant hitherto unpublished texts for understanding puritan debate over this concept of liberty. Although once mis-catalogued as anti-separatist polemic, they in fact document the presbyterians' clandestine "First Examination" of Henry Jacob's argument for "independent" liberty and ecclesiology. It...