Orders will be processed after the Christmas Holiday.

Podcast: The Puritans We Forgot (Jenny-Lyn de Klerk)

February 13, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Not All Puritans Were Men

In today’s episode, Jenny-Lyn de Klerk talks about why it’s worth exploring the lives and theological insights of Puritan women who have often been overlooked.

5 Puritan Women

5 Puritan Women

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk

In 5 Puritan Women: Portraits of Faith and Love, Jenny-Lyn de Klerk shows how the lives and writings of Agnes Beaumont, Lucy Hutchinson, Mary Rich, Anne Bradstreet, and Lady Brilliana Harley encourage the beauty of holy living and provide practical wisdom for the home and the church. 

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:06 - Misconception about Puritans

Matt Tully
Jenny-Lyn, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
Hi. Thanks for having me, Matt.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about the Puritans and Puritan women in particular. Before we jump into women and their unique roles that they’ve had in the history of the church, I wanted to talk more generally about the Puritans as a movement, or a group of people, in church history. Probably no one has done more to help to revitalize the reputation of the Puritans and advocate for their importance in the life of the church in recent years than J. I. Packer, who obviously passed away a few years back. But even with that said, outside of a certain conservative, Reformed circle that we tend to live in and operate in, I would say the Puritans still get a pretty bad rap, generally speaking. And so I wonder if you could just speak to what are some of the most prevalent, unfair assumptions or misconceptions that you see people make about the Puritans today?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
It’s a good question. I kind of wish we were beyond this question, but the truth is that in academia, if you meet any scholar of the 17th century, they know that the stereotypes are just not accurate. So that’s great, but on a popular level, and even in universities around people who maybe aren’t in history or don’t know about the 17th century, these are still really common. So, dear Dr. Packer started a great trend of defending them and just making them more real to us. And I’m glad that me and a lot of other people, in a small way, can continue doing that. I’m not really sure I would list more than one thing. I would probably just say there is a general vibe of they were killjoys. They didn’t want anybody to have any fun. They were very intense—too intense, too a fault. They were obsessed with conforming your outward behavior to certain religious rules. That kind of stuff. There might be one great, big umbrella term, but in my mind those are all related, that they’re just sort of these really negative people that bring down a good vibe. Unfortunately, that is still really common. When I started studying the Puritans, I sort of thought that maybe this was just an old perspective that was perpetuated in their time, and then in some later scholarship that wasn’t favorable to them. But I’m surprised by the weird things that people will ask me. I once had someone ask me out of the blue, just off the top of their head after I had said I was writing my dissertation on John Owen, the first thing that they asked me was did I know of any stories of children raised by Puritans who basically felt abused and then revolted against their upbringing. And I was like, I don’t know where that question came from! And I’m not sure how you came up with that. People are very diverse in history, and so there are all sorts of stories, good and bad, but it’s definitely wrong to assume that somehow the Puritans were bad people, which is essentially what I think people believe, which is really sad.

Matt Tully
Well, that goes to just the broader way that we often think of history. We think in terms of movements and groups, and we can often lose the individual stories and the nuance of people. We don’t treat them like real people. What other kinds of responses have you gotten from your fellow church members as you’ve shared, I’ve got an interest in Puritanism. I’m writing my dissertation, and I’m writing a book now on the Puritans—what are some of the kinds of reactions that you get?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
I guess that would be sort of diverse, depending on who I’m talking to. Some people who have read Dr. Packer actually have heard of the Puritans and probably have a positive view, even if they’ve never read them. So, sometimes you do get a good response, which is nice. I think probably the most common response is people have no idea who they are or what you’re talking about. And then probably the second most common is, Why would you want to get into those guys? They sound weird and horrible. And then maybe the least common response is people being interested and happy and thinking that it’s cool.

05:46 - Why the Puritans?

Matt Tully
It’s so great though that you’re part of this revival, so to speak, of helping the church today to appreciate the Puritans for what they actually did and said, and maybe get away from some of the caricatures. How did you first get into the Puritans as a topic? I know you have always had a love for history and for reading, but what would you say was the main doorway into reading the Puritans?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
When I first became a Christian, I want to say maybe . . . well, maybe not when I first became a Christian. When I first went to college, I discovered J. I. Packer, and I hadn’t read a lot; I probably read like one Packer book. And so I had kind of maybe heard of them, and then when I got married to my husband, I was thinking through a lot of Christian life questions. He said to me, Oh, I think John Owen wrote a famous book about that. Have you ever heard about him? And I was like, I have no idea who that is. So I looked it up, got an Owen book, and then the rest is history. I was just so into it, and I just kept finding more and more. Owen was definitely the gateway drug. Maybe that’s a bad metaphor. Can I say that on this podcast? Is that a bad metaphor?

Matt Tully
I’m not sure what John Owen would think of that. Sometime after discovering the Puritans, generally, through John Owen, you began to discover the writings of various Puritan women, and you experienced a whole new, as you call it, spiritual awakening. I wonder if you could walk us through how that happened.

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
The first thing that got me going on Puritan women was actually my previous boss. I was working at Regent College with their rare book collection, which was actually a bunch of Dr. Packer’s books. My supervisor—shout out to Dr. Cindy Aalders at Regent. She’s great. Look her up. She came into my office and said, Why don’t you do a display or some research thing about Puritan women? In the moment I was horribly embarrassed because I was like, I don’t even know who they are. I didn’t say that out loud, but I was thinking, Oh no! I have no idea where to start with this. Also, how have I never thought to ask that question?

Matt Tully
What is the answer to that question? How is it that, at that point, you’ve already been professionally studying the Puritans to some extent, so why hadn’t they crossed your mind as a category?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
I’ve been very blessed in the schools that I’ve been a part of, and my professors have been some of my favorite, most wonderful people who have been so supportive in my life and have really developed me as a person. But I think, for whatever reason, women’s writings just tend to still fall through the cracks. It’s becoming more common to talk about women in church history, but often it’s, Oh, so and so’s wife—and then you just mention them, and nobody thinks to follow that up with any questions or anything. And so I guess I just hadn’t been in the groove. Not to the fault of my professors or the schools I went to, or maybe even to myself. I think it’s just the general vibe of when you’re doing research, you’re kind of drawn to the most popular people, the most famous people, the hardest and most intense works like Owen. And so you kind of forget to think, Oh, maybe there’s some other little thing that no one has really done a lot of work on that I could look into. And so I think that it’s probably just that they sort of just slipped through the cracks a little bit. But it’s the same with all women in history.

Matt Tully
So what kind of documentation is available now? That could probably be one of the hardest things about Puritan women in particular, that there’s probably just less historical material available at this point. Is that true?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
Yeah, for sure. We could say that about any individual or any group of people in history, depending on what was preserved, what could they have written or recorded in the first place based on their background and education. Did anybody keep the document? There are all sorts of questions. But I was very happily surprised to find that there were a bunch of scholarly editions of primary sources. For some Puritan women, like Anne Bradstreet, who’s very famous in the literature field in terms of American history and things like that, there’s actually a lot of little articles and secondary sources on super, super niche things that people are trying to delve into in terms of her poetry. I got lucky, and there were modern critical additions for all of the women that I came across and the sources that I needed, all except for one. And then there were some old reprints that you can find out of copyright for free (on the internet, for example). So I was very blessed by those wonderful scholars and the publishers who have made that happen.

Matt Tully
What were some of the primary sources that are available for these Puritan women? Are there letters? What kinds of documents are there?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
All sorts of different things. I actually tried to, in my book, give a representation of different genres. So we’ve got Brilliana Harley’s letters, Anne Bradstreet’s poems, Lucy Hutchinson’s theological treatise, and Agnes Beaumont’s personal narrative, and Mary Rich’s meditations that she wrote and a diary that she kept. So there are all sorts of different things, but definitely for women, the more common types of writing that they did were letters and diaries and that sort of thing, rather than formal academic stuff. Because they, obviously, couldn’t go to university, that wasn’t a very common thing for them to do.

Matt Tully
What was life like for a Puritan woman? What things were open to them? What things maybe weren’t open to them, compared to what it’s like today?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
It’s sort of a complex question. I’m glad that you asked it. Obviously, women did not have a lot of the same rights that they do today, and we shouldn’t gloss over that. If you do, then you’re going to totally misunderstand what they’re saying in their writings and what they’re doing in their lives. They couldn’t go to university. They, obviously, couldn’t couldn’t vote. That didn’t come until a lot later. They couldn’t own property, but there were ways that they could have the property passed to them from their husbands. Lucy Hutchinson wasn’t able to go to university, but when her parents saw that she was a really nerdy child and loved reading and was smarter than her brothers, they hired a bunch of tutors to come into the home. She ended up becoming a very well-read and genius person, you know, even though she didn’t have the same opportunities as her brothers did. But there’s also the whole other question of most of the people in this book are relatively wealthy. Agnes Beaumont is not on that spectrum, but she’s still not destitute. So you also have to take that into consideration and think about all sorts of different aspects of their background and what opportunities did they have. And that’s not just a gendered thing. Obviously, there were poor men as well, and they weren’t getting educated or writing anything.

Matt Tully
It’s so helpful to keep that context in mind, because it does help to shape how we would understand what they’re writing, who’s able to write, and who’s not even able to write and have their documents preserved, like all these women that you explore did. You say in the book that one other reason why perhaps Puritan women in particular are often neglected historically is just that “they do not always say what modern historians want them to say.” I found that really interesting, and I was hoping you could explain more of what you meant by that.

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
When I started delving into all of the secondary sources—everything that I could find about women in the 17th century and these particular women—I started to see sort of a trend. I was also talking to people and lecturing at places and just seeing their reactions to things. I sort of started seeing a trend of making excuses for what they’re saying. For example, They were saying this because they were oppressed by their religion or by these men in their life, or something like that. It just felt like it wasn’t really doing justice to their actual opinions. I think we can say that they genuinely wrote what they believed about, because there were also atheist women who wrote about what they believed. I hope that nobody, in trying to read those women, would now force them to become “Christians,” or something like that. It just kind of felt like either what they wrote was being slightly changed—the interpretation was a little bit off—or they were just being neglected compared to some other 17th century women who are way more famous, like Margaret Cavendish and other women who were into science and non-religious and fit into our Western society values today, some of them. That’s what I meant by that. Because they weren’t on about the same topics and beliefs that maybe some of the people who are doing the great work of trying to uncover these writings and get them out there again wanted them to say, they’re either being changed or just neglected compared to some other women. There was kind of that side of it, and then also the flip side of really conservative people making them out to be these paragons of conservative theology, or even politics. Again, just on the other end of the spectrum, forcing their own beliefs onto this person who was in a totally different time and place and not working with the same concepts as we are today.

16:47 - Lucy Hutchinson

Matt Tully
Let’s dig into just one of the stories that you talk about in your book—the story of Lucy Hutchinson. Maybe one of the best little anecdotes that I think gives some insight into her life that I found pretty fun and interesting was the story of how she met her husband, John. I wonder if you could just share a little bit about what that initial meeting was like and maybe what that reveals about Lucy’s character and her interests.

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
I love that part of the story too. I found it so funny. When I first read it, I was just really laughing. I was like, This is the perfect meet cute. Someone’s got to make this into a movie! Like I mentioned earlier, Lucy was really nerdy from a young age. She loved reading. She writes this in sort of like a very small autobiographical excerpt that was attached to her. Basically, kind of like a history of the Civil War, but also a biography of her husband. In that she says, I just liked reading. I didn’t want to hang out with the other kids. I didn’t want to do all the “women things” I was supposed to do, like sewing. That sort of stuff just really bored her.

Matt Tully
Down on sewing.

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
Yeah, exactly. Her father hired a bunch of tutors to teach her at home and she was just really supported in her intellectual endeavors and became this really smart woman. One day, when her later husband (though not at the time) came over to their house, Lucy’s sister was showing them around and he said, Whose Latin books are these? And then her sister said, Oh, those are my sister’s. And he said, Oh, I’d really like to meet her. And so it actually is a good representation of their relationship overall. They were both intellectuals who loved talking about ideas and their whole lives kind of revolved around that and they were very passionate about their beliefs. They really had that in common, and that’s what led to them becoming friends, basically. Lucy said she didn’t really like necessarily hanging out with people all the time, but he was a good person to talk to, maybe compared to some of the less smart people around her.

Matt Tully
You mentioned that they eventually get married, and in the book you do give a little glimpse into what their day-to-day life was like, at least in those early years of marriage. You say they spent their day studying Scripture, debating theological questions with local pastors, listening to sermons, and catechizing their children. What else do we know about what their day-to-day life was like in those early years?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
It’s a good question. It depends if we’re talking before, during, or after the English Civil War, because that obviously greatly affected everyone’s life, even if a person wasn’t directly involved in stuff that was happening, like Mary Rich who was a little bit on the outside and didn’t have super strong political convictions, but the Hutchinsons did. During the Civil War, things were chaotic, but at the same time they were kind of in it together as a family. I’m not really sure what to compare it to in terms of their daily lives. Imagine going through a war.

Matt Tully
Maybe speak to that. I know that Lucy and John both lived during the English Civil War, and that that had a pretty big impact on their family. I wonder if you could just share a little bit about how each of them was involved in the war and what that looked like, and then the long-term impact that the war had on them.

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
Lucy’s husband, John, was a colonel, so he had an official role, and she was also a nurse at the time—both for the Parliamentarian army. So she kind of had less direct involvement, but she really did have strong convictions, just like him, about politics, and they were hardcore parliamentarians.

Matt Tully
What does that mean? Help us understand the summary of the different sides in the war and what was going on there.

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
Basically, what was happening was in England some people were getting really dissatisfied with the monarchy. They were not happy with the way things were panning out, and so Oliver Cromwell—the infamous Oliver Cromwell—formed an army and civil war ensued, basically.
And so those were the Parliamentarians. On the opposite side were the Royalists, who were the supporters of the King, and they basically were duking it out—the Parliamentarians trying to basically overthrow the monarchy and start a new system of government, which they were partly successful in, as we know King Charles I was executed, and then there was a period of time called the interregnum where there was no king. But it ended up not working out for them, because Charles I’s son, Charles II, ended up taking the throne and the restoration started. So at that time, as you can probably guess, power structures were being flipped. First, it was the king and his people that were in charge. Then, the Parliamentarians and their people, and then the king again. And so there was backlash against everyone who was involved in the Parliamentarian cause. So that included Lucy and John, and John was imprisoned and unfortunately died there, just because he got sick and it wasn’t great conditions.

Matt Tully
What kind of impact did that have on Lucy and their family?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
It was really devastating. While he was in prison, she was, in a way, trying to get him out, trying to convince him to do things that would get himself out, even if it was going back on his beliefs. And so I think there was a real hope that he was going to get out, and then he didn’t, and so it was really horrible. Obviously, there are limitations on what women can do at this time. They don’t have an education, so there are also limits in that sense. What ended up happening was Lucy had to basically sell off their estates and try to find employment for her kids and try to figure out where to live and all sorts of stuff. Even when they were in the war, which was a horrible time, I think there was this sense of they were together and they were a family and they were going to get through it together kind of thing. And then when he died, it was like, Great. Now I have to do this all by myself. I have these kids I have to take care of and I don’t really have the means of doing that. We actually don’t know what happened to her. The last record we have is—obviously, you can’t just pick and choose and say, I wonder what was happening in this year of her life. You have to go based on what are the available documents and the information. Toward the end of her life, it kind of seems like she was traveling around the London area, maybe just staying with friends. We know that she was going to sermons on Sundays. So it seems like she sort of ended up living this kind of nomadic lifestyle, which was really, really difficult and horrible, as you can imagine—kind of losing your livelihood. Thankfully, she still had her kids, which was good.

Matt Tully
But at the time, if a woman or a family lost the father, they really were economically and socially pretty exposed. Is that right?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
Yeah. Lucy had grown up with wealth, and with John they were doing well, and so at that point, you usually have a group of friends, or there’s some kind of community, where so and so takes in this widow or whoever takes in someone’s uncle or whatever it is. Someone is sick and they go to live with a family member or friends. That is definitely a safety net. She wasn’t destitute, but very limited. It’s not just like, get a job and now all your family comes to live with you and it’s really easy and they visit all the time and they just fly out. Obviously, that would still be horrible today, but you have more options for what’s going on.

Matt Tully
So then after her husband’s death, Lucy then went on to write something pretty remarkable, and it was for the sake of her daughter, Barbara. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about what that was.

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
She actually wrote a lot of different types of books. I just focus on this particular book because it’s the most immediately relevant for the Christian life, which I think is what the average Christian person is most interested in rather than 17th century politics and stuff like that.
But she did write other things, which was cool. She was definitely a writer in her own right. She wrote what we believe today is the only theological treatise that we have from a woman in the 17th century. Basically, like a more systematic theological document, as compared to something like a letter or a poem or a diary which has theological ideas in it, if it’s written by a Christian, but isn’t fleshed out and is not focusing on dogmatic theology.

Matt Tully
What exactly was she trying to accomplish in this, and what was the purpose of writing it?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
She says in a little letter that’s the preface to the beginning of the book that this is for her oldest daughter, Barbara. It seems like from the context of what she’s writing that Barbara had just got married and now she was going off to live with her husband and she’s not under her mother’s house anymore and under her rules, under her Christian way of living. She’s wanting to basically say to Barbara how important it is to stick close to the church and its faith, and how important it is to love other Christians, no matter what denomination they’re in, and love all people, whether they’re religious or not. It’s a pretty amazing book because it doesn’t, like I said earlier, there isn’t another example that we have from the 17th century. At the beginning when she’s writing this letter to Barbara, it almost kind of looks like a mother’s advice book, which was a common genre at the time and would often be written because the mother might be preparing to die in childbirth and she wants to pass on her beliefs, or give a little something for her kids. So that’s kind of the way that Lucy is writing this. We’re not sure though if she was maybe just using that language to then jump into a different thing that wasn’t common, or if she actually did think maybe she was dying. We don’t know. It’s kind of like a last will and testament vibe in the letter that she writes to Barbara. But then it has this big theology book, so it’s really cool, and it’s pretty hardcore. I forced my husband to read it last year when I was writing the book because I was like, You just have to read this. It’s so cool. I’m annoyed with you if you don’t read this. I love Lucy Hutchinson so much, and he was totally in love with it. Within the first page he was like, This is the coolest thing I’ve ever read. She obviously, like any theologian does, borrows from a lot of other sources. You’re building on other people. But she’s also very innovative and just has a real skill for writing. And so when you’re reading it, you’re realizing, Wow! This is really powerful. It’s high thought and high scholarship, and at the same time just beautifully written and really interesting and precise.

Matt Tully
What are some of the theological topics that she covers? Is it designed to be a pretty comprehensive systematic theology, or is she more focused than that?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
It is systematic. Not in the sense that if you pulled a systematic book off the shelf today it would be exactly the same, but similar to the idea of Calvin’s Institutes. It’s not as big as Calvin’s Institutes, but it’s kind of the old way of doing systematics. Obviously, things get more and more and more developed over time, and so our systematic theology ss getting even more detailed and longer and longer. She starts with knowledge of God and knowledge of self, which is basically exactly where Calvin starts Institutes. And we know she did read the Institutes, so that’s probably where she got her inspo. And then she talks about creation and sin and salvation. It’s just all of the basic topics that you would pretty much expect. And then by the end of it, she starts getting more into Christian life stuff, like your relationship with God, and she alludes to a second book that is supposed to be all about ecclesiology. But that was either lost or maybe she never wrote it. We don’t have that. It kind of stops there, but there is actually still quite a bit about the church in the Christian life section at the end, so you still get a little bit of that in there.

Matt Tully
So you said that some of the work that she did in this book was innovative and maybe even creative. Are there any sections or bits of theology that she does that stood out to you and when you read them you were kind of like, Wow! That’s a really fascinating insight that maybe I haven’t heard from anywhere else?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
Oh boy, all sorts of stuff. When my husband read the beginning of the book, he was amazed by her definition of God, basically, and her description of God’s nature. That stuff is really technical though, so maybe I’ll talk about more of a fun thing. I was surprised when I got to one of the sections that she’s sort of talking about our relationship to God and how important it is to be grateful to God. And then in this one area, she sort of goes on a little side rant about how she thinks that one of the reasons Christians are not grateful enough to God for all the things they have in their life is basically because they don’t love other people enough. They don’t realize and see that God has blessed every single human being on earth with so many diverse things that they need, and they’re coming to all of us no matter who we are throughout history. And we all get to benefit from them. So, the different seasons and all the creatures and different specific ways God loves all of us.

32:24 - What Are We Missing If We Neglect the Stories of Puritan Women?

Matt Tully
Let’s take a step back, Jenny-Lyn, and I wonder if you could just answer a simple question: Why do you think it is important for the church to read the stories—to know the stories—of Puritan women in particular? What are we missing out on if we continue to neglect their stories?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
That’s a great question. Maybe I’ll answer it from a few different angles. I think from a historical perspective, if we are only talking about the most famous people, which are usually the men, then we sort of have this unrealistic view of what society was like. Were there just a bunch of men? Where did they come from? So, just in terms of trying to understand history better, the more people you know of—young people, old people, men, women, educated, not educated, people with different beliefs—the better you actually understand the world at that particular place in the world at that time. I think from a theology perspective, like I said earlier, the Puritans were known for their work on the Christian life and applying the Bible to every aspect of life. But often when you read the male puritans, like the famous ones and the pastors, they are getting into intense ideas. They’re talking about all the ideas. Not necessarily in a non-practical way—obviously, that’s what they were good at—but they’re kind of giving the formal, official This is the Puritan view of this or This is the Reformed view, as they would say it. They obviously wouldn’t say the Puritan view themselves. But I think what we can benefit from when we read the women is that you actually see it playing out in real life, which is way messier than the official statement of what we believe about this. So that’s kind of what I found when I started studying the Puritan women was not all of them are making explicit statements all the time like, This is what I believe. Therefore, I did this and it’s this perfect formula. It’s just that stuff is happening in their life and they’re going along with it as a Puritan, and they’re writing in sort of a more raw, unfiltered way. There’s a complicated way of understanding women and publishing at this time, so I maybe won’t dive into that, but we can say that, obviously, someone like John Owen was intentionally publishing for academia. He was intentionally preaching for the church, whereas sometimes these women were just writing down their daily experiences and thoughts. And so I think that gives a different side to it, but a super important side because if we’re saying that the main thing that Puritans were good at was applying the Bible to life, we want to see that happening in real time.

Matt Tully
That’s so good. Maybe one more kind of nuanced version of that question: I wonder if you could speak to the men listening in particular right now. Why should they, in particular—why should we, as men—not neglect the stories of not just Puritan women, but women from church history, even more generally than that?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
In a general sense, anyone can learn about anyone. You never know when you read someone’s story what’s going to ring true to you or somehow be related to something in your life. And so I think for all of us, it can be this exercise of self-reflection and practicing compassion for other people and even for ourselves. But I think it’s important for guys to also read about women just to, again, remember that there are different experiences and to bring women back into the conversation as a part of the group—including women in your own church. Unfortunately, sometimes that’s a common thing in churches is you kind of just forget about the women. Or you’re not asking, What are they doing, or what would they like to do? It’s the opposite posture of, Let’s make sure they don’t do things that we don’t want them to do. I think just hearing more diverse stories, having different influences in your life, making yourself aware of what other people think about other than me and my favorite three dude theologians.

37:10 - Most Overrated and Underrated Puritans

Matt Tully
All right, I have a couple of last fun questions here. Who is the most overrated Puritan in your mind—man or woman? I’m assuming it’s going to be a man because they’re the ones that we all tend to talk about. And who is the most underrated Puritan?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
Oh man, overrated? I feel like everyone doesn’t like them enough for anybody to be overrated. But you know what? Sometimes John Owen is overrated in a weird way. I feel like sometimes people only go to Owen for stuff about covenant theology—things that he’s famous for—and I wish that there would be more research on books that he’s written and other arguments. It’s just never talked about. And then if someone all of a sudden read all the popular books about Owen and then read Owen, they’d be like, Oh, this guy’s actually a little bit different than what I thought he was. I don’t know if that’s actually overrated or not. Maybe the ideal of John Owen is overrated. Underrated? I don’t want be a broken record, but I really think Lucy Hutchinson is so cool, and everyone would be better if they read Lucy Hutchinson.

Matt Tully
What’s the name of that book that she wrote? Is that what she’s most famous for?

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
No, that’s definitely not what she was most famous for. That’s her most neglected book. It’s called Principles of the Christian Religion. There’s an old reprint version you can look at online, and then there’s the expensive but beautiful and amazing Oxford University Press version of her theological writings. And then there’s my book, from which you could get little tidbits of!

Matt Tully
Thank you so much, Jenny-Lyn for talking to us today, helping us to get a little more insight into the Puritans in general, but Puritan women in particular, and they’re important stories for us. We appreciate it.

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk
Thanks so much for having me, Matt.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.