The writings of the Puritans, states Robert P. Martin in his preface, ‘are a rich banquet table loaded with solid nourishment for God’s people’. And yet this banquet is often hard to access, for it can be difficult to know both where to start with the Puritans, and also where to find help on a specific topic or text of Scripture.
Martin’s Guide, available for the first time in hardback, aims to help the would-be feaster access the nourishment available from the Puritans and their successors. That last word is significant, because the scope of Martin’s indexing work extended not merely to those in the 16th and 17th Century who might properly be called ‘Puritans’ but also to figures of the 18th to 20th centuries who have stood in the Reformed, evangelical tradition of the Puritans, both feeding on and developing their approach.
This is neither a scholarly apparatus nor a comprehensive guide to the corpus of Puritan writing. What it is, however, is a helpful orientation to a tradition, and a guide for those with an appetite to read the Puritans and their successors more, and to read them better. Those in search of what the Puritans had to say on specific topics and texts, and those eager for some direction in their reading, will be well served by the indexing labours of Robert P. Martin.