All 4 Uses
Puritans
in
Middlemarch
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- The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably "good:" if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate.†
Chpt 1Puritan = an English Protestant who in the 16th and 17th centuries who wanted simpler worship and strict, hard-working lives
- In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults and virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle's talk or his way of "letting things be" on his estate, and making her long all the more for the time when she would be of age and have some command of money for generous schemes.†
Chpt 1
- Lydgate was no Puritan, but he did not care for play, and winning money at it had always seemed a meanness to him; besides, he had an ideal of life which made this subservience of conduct to the gaining of small sums thoroughly hateful to him.†
Chpt 2 *
- But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.†
Chpt 2Puritanism = a religious movement of the 16th and 17th centuries to purify Protestant Christianity of rituals of the Catholic Church
Definitions:
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(1)
(Puritans) English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who wanted simpler, “purer” worship and emphasized hard work over pleasureProtestants are Christian groups that broke away from the Catholic Church; in the United States, well-known Protestant churches include Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians.
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) As a common noun (not capitalized unless at the start of a sentence), puritan or puritanical can refer to someone who is very strict -- especially about religious principles or proper behavior.