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1. The termPuritanism was a movement within the early modern Church of England characterized by unusual and profoundly moral religious seriousness, by efforts to have Christianity permeate all of private and social life, and by the desire for more extensive Protestant reforms in worship and church polity. It emerged soon after the founding of the Church of England in 1559 (Anglicanism) and experienced its heyday in the 17th century.Although it never captured the allegiance of the majority of English Protestants, until the restoration of the monarchy (1660 a…

1. TerminologyEcclesiastical unions are institutional mergers of confessionally distinct churches involving rapprochement (of various kinds) in doctrine, polity, and worship. They represent a contrary movement to the early modern tendency to confessional diversification of Christianity (Confessionalization) and are part of the prehistory of the comprehensive 20th century efforts to represent the unity of the Christian ecumene. Concretely, the term is applied to two independent phenomena: the affi…