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A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 . By Philip F. Gura. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. xv + 398 pp. $29.95.

In this book Philip Gura has compiled information about the early religious radicals of New England that is certainly not unuseful. The "case studies" of Samuel Gorton and William Pynchon with which the monograph concludes, for example, not only draw convincing intellectual portraits of the two, but also depict their beliefs within the larger pattern of radical religious thought in England. Further, Gura's comprehensive investigation of the sources fully and effectively documents that diversity of Puritan theology that has caught the attention of scholars currently reassessing Perry Miller's interpretation of "the" New England mind. Apart from its intent to demonstrate this diversity, however, the book lacks an ordering thesis and therefore meanders through its own wealth of detail along a frequently repetitious course. The first five chapters, for instance, identify the radicals "through large ideological categories of individuals": separatism, radical spiritism, Baptists, millenarians, and Quakers. But the use of this rather static set of categories makes it difficult either to follow the movement by many of these individuals from group to group or to focus upon and posit an explanation for convictions shared by different groups. Hence, the repetition of biographical and theological data from chapter to chapter may point to a flaw in interpretive structure and not simply to inadequate editorial work. Organizationally, chapters do not build logically upon one another. Nothing intrinsic to the book's structure would prevent chapter six on the "inherent radicalism" of Puritan thought from becoming, with only minor modifications, chapter one. Neither is it apparent why the "Puritan rationalists" come on the scene in chapter eleven instead of being described in the initial five chapters with other basic types of radicalism. Similarly, the three concluding studies of Anne Hutchinson, Gorton, and Pynchon present valuable information, but they are less the culmination of the study than simply detailed illustrations of earlier topics. In sum, Gura has provided scholars with the raw material vital to a comprehensive revision of Perry Miller's interpretation, but he himself has not set forth such a revision.