A Puritan of 16th and 17th century England was any person seeking "purity" of worship and doctrine, especially the parties that rejected the Reformation of the Church of England, and those who justified separation from the Church of England following the Elizabethan Religious Settlement are commonly called "Puritans" by historians and critics. However only some Puritans were in favor of separating from the English Church, which was currently under King James I. Most Puritans only wanted to change certain aspects of the church. Later groups are called "puritan", not necessarily favorably, by comparison to these low church Anglicans and Calvinistic Non-conformists.

Originally used to describe a third-century sect of strictly legalistic heretics, the word "Puritan" is now applied unevenly to a number of Protestant churches from the late 16th century to the present. Puritans did not originally use the term for themselves. It was a term of abuse that first surfaced in the 1560s. "Precisemen" and "Precisions" were other early antagonistic terms for Puritans who preferred to call themselves "the godly." The word "Puritan" thus always referred to a type of religious belief, rather than a particular religious sect. To reflect that the term encompasses a variety of ecclesiastical bodies and theological positions, scholars today increasingly prefer to use the term as a common noun or adjective: "puritan" rather than "Puritan." In fact, spouses (albeit, in practice, mainly females) were disciplined if they did not perform their sexual marital duties, in accordance with 1 Corinthians 7 and other biblical passages. Because of these beliefs, they did publicly punish drunkenness and sexual relations outside of marriage.
Alexis de Tocqueville suggested in Democracy in America that the Pilgrims' Puritanism was the very thing that provided a firm foundation for American democracy, and in his view, these Puritans were hard-working, egalitarian, and studious. The theme of a religious basis of economic discipline is echoed in sociologist Max Weber's work, but both de Tocqueville and Weber argued that this discipline was, not a force of economic determinism, but one factor among many that should be considered when evaluating the relative economic success of the Puritans. In Hellfire Nation, James A. Monroe suggests that some opposing tendencies within Puritanism—its desire to create a just society and its moral fervor in bringing about that just society, which sometimes created paranoia and intolerance for other views—were all at the root of America's current political landscape.

In the United States, "Puritan" has not always been the only acceptable spelling. Through the 20th century, "Puritain" was an acceptable alternative spelling in British English. During the 17th and 18th centuries in England, the word was spelled both with and without the second i. "Puritain" was more common in the 16th century. The word derives from "purity" in English, and the suffix meaning "dweller"/"practitioner" can be spelled -ain or -an, depending upon the language.




An emphasis on private study of the Bible
A desire to see education and enlightenment for the masses (especially so they could read the Bible for themselves)
The priesthood of all believers
Simplicity in worship, the exclusion of vestments, images, candles, etc.
Did not celebrate traditional holidays that they believed to be in violation of the regulative principle of worship.
Believed the Sabbath was still obligatory for Christians, although they believe the Sabbath had been changed to Sunday.
Some approved of the church hierarchy, but others sought to reform the episcopal churches on the presbyterian model. Some separatist Puritans were presbyterian, but most were congregationalists.
List of Puritans
Independents
Addison, Albert Christopher The Romantic Story of the Puritan Fathers and their founding of new Boston 1912 published by L C Page Boston Mass USA
Anderson, Virginia Dejohn (1993). New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the 17th Century. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44764-X. 
Beeke, Joel R.. Puritan Reformed Spirituality. Evangelical Press. ISBN 9780852346297. 
Warren, John (1993). Elizabeth I: Religion and Foreign Affairs. Hodder and Stoughton, p. 104. ISBN 0-340-55518-1. 
Beeke, Joel, and Pederson, Randall, Meet the Puritans: With a Guide to Modern Reprints (2006) ISBN 9781601780003
Bennett, Arthur G., ed., The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions (While not directly about the puritans, this anthology gives a representative overview of the ways they viewed their relationship with God.)
Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism
Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, The Precisionist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and the Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638
Brachlow, Stephen, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1750–1625
Bremer, Francis J., John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father
Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement
Collinson, Patrick, Godly People
Collinson, Patrick, Religion of Protestants
Foster, Stephen, The Long Argument
Gatiss, Lee, The Tragedy of 1662: The Ejection and Persecution of the Puritans, ISBN 9780946307609
Graham, Judith, "Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall"
Haigh, Christopher, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors
Haigh, Christopher, "The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation," in Past and Present, No. 93. (Nov., 1981), pp. 37–69.
Hall, David D., Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology
Hall, David D., Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
Hawthorne, Nathaniel., The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Kapic, Kelly M. and Randal Gleason, eds. The Devoted Life: An Invitation to the Puritan Classics
Kizer, Kay. "Puritans"
Lake, Peter, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church
Lake, Peter, "Defining Puritanism—again?" in Bremer, Francis J., ed., Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives
Leverenz, David, "The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History"
Lewis, Peter, The Genius of Puritanism
Logan, Samuel T. Jr., Reformation for the Glory of God
Packer, J. I., A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life, Crossway Books: 1994 (reprint), ISBN 0-89107-819-3
Monaghan, Jennifer, "Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America"
Ryken, Leland, Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were, ISBN 0-310-32501-3
Tyacke, Nicholas, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism
Underdown, David, Fire From Heaven
Morgan, Edmund S., The Puritan Family
Morgan, Edmund S., The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, ISBN 0-321-04369-3
Miller, Perry, The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry
Packer, J.I., A Quest For Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life
Porterfield, Ann, "Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism"
Saxton, Martha, "Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America"
Vaughn, Alden and Francis Bremer, "Puritan New England"
Larousse Dictionary of Beliefs and Religions
Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
A Puritan's Mind, some writings of the Puritans and their admirers
Puritan sermons
Extensive Puritan resources on Monergism.com