[1] John Spurr argues that changes in the terms of membership of the Church of England, in 1604–6, 1626, 1662, and also 1689, led to re-definitions of the word "Puritan".
[2] Basil Hall, citing Richard Baxter considers that "Puritan" dropped out of contemporary usage in 1642, with the outbreak of the First English Civil War, being replaced by more accurate religious terminology.
[4] For this reason a term sometimes preferred is "Hot Protestantism": i.e. one approach to Puritanism is to regard it simply as Protestant belief, intensely held.
[5] Numerous, generally small, Calvinist dissenting groups and sects are classified as broad-sense Puritans.
[7] The Puritans took the side of Calvin and the Zwinglians, against Philip Melanchthon, in this early contentious debate of the Protestant Reformation.
[11] Ferrell argues that conforming Puritanism was at the same time part of a theological consensus, and in terms of church polity a target of the sustained and divisive Jacobean polemical campaign against further reform.
[18] Godly gentlemen, the so-called Puritan gentry, then became a significant factor in English life and politics.
[27] The cultural form of Puritanism that was a major influence in the development of New England is admitted by historians to be problematic in its definition.
The "New England mind", however, about which Perry Miller wrote in connection with "Puritan culture", has been subject to extensive revisionism, as has earlier work in this field.