For many English puritans the new world represented new opportunities for the reification of
reformation if not a site within which they might begin to experience the conditions of the
millennium itself. For many Irish Catholics by contrast the new world became associated with
the experience of defeat forced transportation indentured service cultural and religious
loss. And yet as the chapters in this volume demonstrate the Atlantic experience of puritans
and Catholics could be much less bifurcated than some of the established scholarly narratives
have suggested: puritans and Catholics could co-exist within the same trans-Atlantic families
Catholics could prosper just as puritans could experience financial decline and Catholics and
puritans could adopt and exchange similar kinds of belief structures and practical
arrangements even to the extent of being mistaken for each other. This volume investigates the
history of Puritans and Catholics in the Atlantic world 1600-1800.
