Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire

Abstract

Widely regarded as a notable exemplar of Puritanism in its various dimensions among the gentry and as a model landlord and employer, John Bruen (1560–1625) was celebrated in a biography by the Cheshire clergyman William Hinde published in 1641. Both subject and author are carefully analysed and contextualised in this article. So also is the significant afterlife of a text deemed relevant not only in the troubled decade of the English Civil Wars but even, after its re-issuing and re-packaging in edited form, at the very end of the eighteenth century when a new crisis engulfed the country at home and abroad.