Chapter 3 Tales of wonder, spiritual autobiographies, and providence tales

Jim Egan

Recent scholarship on providence tales, wonder tales, and spiritual autobiographies has revolutionized how we view these genres in relation to the major developments in the literary and cultural histories of the period, demonstrating the inextricable relation between these very genres and those works and authors from the period whom we consider most sophisticated and worthy of study. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park’s Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998), Mary Baine Campbell’s Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (2004), and Barbara M. Benedict’s Curiosity: A Cultural History of Inquiry (2001) have all shown the way in which these seemingly “lowbrow” genres were, in fact, integral parts of so-called “highbrow” culture during this period.¹ In addition, each of these works of scholarship has demonstrated how the odd and unusual events presented in providence tales, wonder tales, and spiritual autobiographies played crucial roles in the transformation of the way early moderns experienced the world in which they lived. Such transformations did not sweep away the old as the new emerged, though, for older ways of organizing the world not only remained well into the modern period but, in fact, actively helped shape ways of experiencing the world we now cast as distinctly modern. Julie Crawford’s Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (2005) and Alexandra Walsham’s Providence in Early Modern England (1999) each demonstrate the continuing importance of the belief in Godly intervention deep into the so-called era of Enlightenment.² The belief in such interventions in shaping the spiritual development of individuals remained as well, as D. Bruce Hindmarsh shows in The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (2005).³ Hindmarsh reveals the persistence of the spiritual autobiography through the eighteenth century; he also shows that people from different races, genders, classes, and ranks tried their hand at spiritual autobiographies.

David D. Hall’s Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989) demonstrates the enormous popularity of these genres among New English readers of the period, and provides the most thorough account of the way such writings reflect the worldviews of British-American colonists in the Northeast.⁴ As its title suggests, James D. Hartman’s Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature (1999) suggests providence tales did not simply reflect early cultural attitudes but produced the major themes and forms of a distinctly American literary tradition.⁵ Susan Scott Parrish’s American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (2006) reveals the way colonial British-American writers gained social status amongst those at the metropolitan center when they described, for audiences in London, events often considered wonders as objects of natural history.⁶

Books such as those mentioned above have revealed how wonder tales, providence tales, and spiritual autobiographies played crucial roles in forming, sustaining, and reproducing the Anglophone transatlantic communities that sprung to life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The circulation of texts that sought to understand the meaning of the calamities, triumphs, and stresses of people’s everyday lives helped forge sentimental, intellectual, and material bonds that led British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic to feel a kinship with people with whom they would never share the same physical space. Providence tales, wonder tales, and spiritual autobiographies published in England but increasingly incorporating material originating in the colonies encouraged readers to see themselves as part of a coherent, unified group, a group whose relation to God’s various ways of manifesting Himself in the world bound them together as one people. These works helped readers overcome early modern theories of identity formation, which held that the differences between people across the globe were brought about, in part, by the different climates in each region. English people living in America, then, put their very Englishness at risk living in America. Stories of shipwrecks, deformed children, and lightning strikes helped readers see themselves as part of a coherent community in spite of the fact that English people who lived in America faced significantly new environmental and social challenges in their daily lives.

The transatlantic community which providence tales, wonder tales, and spiritual autobiographies helped to create was not a single entity or a uniform collective of people. Stories of spiritual awakenings, witches, and inexplicable bodily deformities sometimes cast English peoples in America or Europe as a coherent community, but they also led those very same people to think of themselves in relation to others in ways that differentiated those within the broad transatlantic community and/or excluded other categories of people such as America’s earlier inhabitants from this new Atlantic world in the first place. From the seventeenth century spiritual autobiographies, for instance, taught readers to focus on their own unique experiences, unwittingly and perhaps unintentionally encouraging the emergence during this period of the great value placed on the individual in the modern world. Tales of wonder regarding white Indians found in America, to take another example, played a role in the formation of modern notions of race. New ways, in other words, of thinking of oneself and of one’s racial and gender identities were brought to life, at least in part, in stories of wonder, God’s providence, and spiritual growth.

Whatever role they played in such conceptual revolutions, these tales sustained an enormous level of popularity throughout the period. Their popularity can be seen, in part, by the fact that they were issued by printers of all kinds, from small presses to large presses, urban presses and rural presses, presses catering to the elite and those catering to the barely literate, and all other categories of press that existed in the period. Few genres of writing were printed so frequently by so many different kinds of presses. Their popularity fostered the exponential growth of printed material circulating in English America and Great Britain, a growth that literally altered the cultural landscape and helped usher in modern notions of the press and the value of circulating printed materials about important events among the general population. While many of these tales of extraordinary events that transformed the most mundane of lives were written by authors or editors who were never well regarded and whose identities have long been forgotten, many others were written by the most learned and skilled authors of the period who would eventually be enshrined as canonical authors. In addition to the famous and the infamous, the authors of these tales came from every social category. Men published in each of these genres, as did women. People of African descent published spiritual autobiographies, and Native American authors told stories of their own religious awakenings as well, often integrating them in other genres – the captivity narrative, as in black minister John Marrant’s extremely popular Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant (1785), or Lives as in the case of American Indian minister Samson Occom (1765).⁷ People who occupied lowly social positions found ways to get their stories told, as did those in the highest social ranks. These genres had an equally diverse range of readers, from the most exalted members of the nobility to indentured servants, and this diverse group of readers sought out such genres for a wide range of reasons. Some found seventeenth-century American writers to be particularly powerful on matters of the spirit, while others found momentary diversion in reading providence tales and wonders from so-called “exotic” locales. Works that put the world’s wonders on display found readers among natural philosophers who sought to understand the natural forces at the root of such phenomena in addition to those readers who simply wanted to experience the marvel of God’s working in the world. As befitting the range of presses that issued them, the diversity of readers who consumed them, and the scope of authors who wrote them, wonder tales, providence tales, and spiritual autobiographies appeared in a variety of different formats. They could be found in pamphlets published in the hopes of reaching as many readers as possible, but they could also be found in diaries kept hidden from all but the author’s own eyes. The genres provide, in short, a remarkable window into the formation of categories of collective identity, and the range of authors, readers, formats, and means of production allows us to see these new identities come to life from an extraordinary array of perspectives, many of which saw these new developments in ways that seem mutually exclusive.

Spiritual autobiographies, providence tales, and wonder tales should be distinguished. Providence tales explain the meaning of remarkable events by showing how they demonstrate God’s intervention in worldly affairs, an intervention aimed at rewarding or punishing humans by altering the normal laws of nature to suit His purposes. Spiritual autobiographies focus attention on an individual’s recognition of the ubiquitous presence of God in the world, a realization that often comes through acts of God’s providence. In some sense, then, spiritual autobiographies are simply subsets of providence tales. Both providence tales and spiritual autobiographies follow strict generic formulae; their forms, in fact, distinguish them from wonder tales more than their contents do. First, for a tale to be a providence tale or spiritual autobiography, it must include God’s direct intervention. Second, these acts of God structure every aspect of the narrative, serving as the pivot points around which all other narrative details revolve, and they define the narrative’s conflicts and the rise and fall of its actions. Third, God’s interventions reveal something about the relation the story’s events bear to an external and more encompassing narrative. In the case of spiritual autobiographies, this means that divine intervention tells us something about the story of the individual’s fate in the afterlife; in the case of providence tales, God’s interventions are clues about which community will turn out in the end to be God’s chosen people. The narrator and/or the reader might be uncertain about how to interpret these relations accurately, but they must be understood to cast some light on these external – and, in some ways, more important – narratives, even if God’s meaning can never be known with certainty. The formal requirement that God intervene in providence tales and spiritual autobiographies distinguishes them from wonder tales. An account of some out-of-the-ordinary happenings somewhere in the world is a wonder tale, whereas one that casts those happenings as God’s way of speaking to humans is a providence tale. One that includes such oddities in the course of describing the spiritual growth of an individual is a spiritual autobiography. Whereas virtually anything out of the ordinary one finds in the world, from what happens in one’s own dreams to what happens in the most remote part of the world, could be included in a providence tale, if the dream or the event is not interpreted for God’s message, one is in the realm of the wonder.

While there is much overlap, then, in the form and content of these genres, each has its own way of dealing with the intrusion of the supernatural in everyday life. Take spiritual autobiographies. As we noted above, works in this genre tell the story of a person’s spiritual life. Grace serves as the organizing principle that drives and structures every piece of writing in the genre. This does not mean that these narratives spend a great deal of time explaining the processes by which the subject came to know he or she had attained God’s grace. Indeed, few works in this genre devote much space to what it is that leads them to believe they have achieved salvation. This is partly due to the fact that, for many of the narrators, one can only be certain that one can’t be certain of one’s place in the Kingdom of God. Absolute confidence in one’s election was considered a sign of the influence of Satan rather than an indication of God’s grace, a point made forcefully in the sermons and theological works of Jonathan Edwards, who conducted an extensive correspondence with his Scottish Calvinist counterpart John Erskine. Instead, spiritual autobiographies focus readers’ attention on the role of the spirit in their lives. Rather than demonstrating how the subject has achieved grace, the spiritual autobiography tries to illustrate through countless specific examples drawn from the narrator’s life experiences the way belief in a higher power has transformed the subject’s view of the world. In focusing our attention on belief rather than grace, these autobiographies show the workings of God in everyday lives.

Pointing out God’s presence in even the most mundane moments of the day did more than produce a feeling that one could not escape the eyes of the ultimate judge. It also endowed all people, places, and objects in the world with narrative potential. The meanings that Protestants found buried beneath the surface of life’s smallest details cast the elements of the world as part of a series of interlocking stories. A plugged drainpipe tells us much more than simply that a powerful rain has drenched the region. This seemingly random event recorded by the minister Samuel Sewall in the 1690s in his diary tells us, on the one hand, something about the individual and/or the community’s place in a larger narrative.⁸ Is this a sign that the individual whose drain has been clogged might be among those who will gain election to heaven? Is a clogged drain in a fierce storm a sign of God’s displeasure with New England? Is it a sign that both are true? Or perhaps that neither is true? While one can never be certain of the answers to these questions, one can be sure that the state of one’s drainpipe is part of a narrative written by God and involving everything else in the universe. In being a sign, even an ultimately unknowable sign, of the fate of an individual and a community, the state of one’s drainpipe organizes all the pieces of the world into a coherent narrative structure. Life is a story, God is the author, and the objects and events that make up the stuff of life itself contain the entirety of the narratives within them if we could only just unlock their mysteries.

While spiritual autobiographies struggled with making sense of the narrative hiding within events as they related to the spiritual development of an individual, providence tales helped readers interpret what God’s intervention in everyday affairs meant for a community’s role in the story of the world. Against a tide of secular historiography religious writers on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century like Edwards or Cotton Mather continued to construe history itself as a providential tale. The American Revolution, according to some commentators, succeeded because of God’s direct intervention in the war between England and her colonies. This providential understanding of history cast economic, political, and social events not as the primary engines that drove history forwards but, on the contrary, as epiphenomena caused by an unseen force. History was seen as teleological and analogical, with movement forwards and backwards, with God not merely judging the actions of nations in the midst of history but sending signals to alert the actors of their misdeeds. Since many Protestants believed well into the eighteenth century in some form of predestination, human history was not imagined as moving forwards into an empty temporal space that had yet to be filled with actions. Instead, those who believed in predestination saw the events of the world as simply fulfilling a story line that had already been written. Humans were acting according to a script rather than improvising their lives.

What role, these narratives implicitly ask, do the people we would call the Pilgrims play in the story of the world? Are they the new Jerusalem and, therefore, the protagonists of a teleological narrative? Or are they merely bit players, secondary figures whose community will ultimately not be favored by God but will, in the end, merely be transformed into another story from which future generations might learn? Should the narrative of their transatlantic experiences be understood as a tragedy or a romance: an expression of a futile or misguided effort to achieve salvation, or a narrative of redemption?

William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (1620–47) can serve as a useful example of the way history itself could be viewed as a providence tale. Written between 1620 and 1650, Of Plymouth Plantation tells the story of the English Separatists who would form the core of the initial settlers of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Bradford searches for signs throughout the narrative of the so-called “Pilgrims’” decision to leave England for Holland, subsequent resettlement in America, and life in Plymouth. He begins with great confidence that the exile of English Separatists bears such striking parallels to biblical narratives that the New England Pilgrims were, in fact, God’s chosen people. At first, the transatlantic crossing appears to confirm this confidence. As the Pilgrims approach the American coast, for instance, a sailor who had mistreated the Pilgrims on the crossing meets his death when he drowns after falling overboard. Bradford wastes no time explaining to his readers that this is a sign from God. It is not simply that God is sending a signal of the cost of a lack of faith. What makes this a providential tale is the suggestion that the sailor’s untimely death after spending so much time mocking the Pilgrims shows that the Pilgrims bear a special relationship to God, so special that He has chosen them above all other communities. By the end of Bradford’s narrative, though, his confidence has eroded. The switch from communal farming to individual plots, the dispersion of the community beyond the original settlement as individuals search for more profitable land, the dwindling religious fervor of those who remain in Plymouth, and a range of other events lead him to question his community’s place in God’s narrative. Earthquakes, wars with the natives, and poor corn production all become messages from God that New England has strayed from the path of righteousness. Bradford fears these signs indicate that New Englanders were never God’s chosen community; he fears, in other words, that they had misunderstood New England’s narrative function from the very start.

Providence tales concerned individuals as much as they concerned communities of people. God indicated the place of particular communities in the narrative of the world through providential acts, but He also used providence to send messages about individual behavior. In Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), a history of the New England colonies, Cotton Mather tells the story of an unmarried woman who murders her newborn child. She manages to hide not only her pregnancy but also giving birth until soon after she has committed infanticide, when her crime is exposed and she is tried and convicted. While the details of just how this woman could have concealed her pregnancy and delivery are so unimportant as to warrant no mention, Mather takes great pains to point out that she is ultimately hanged twice. After her conviction for murder, she survives her first hanging. Her luck brings her no reprieve, though, but instead prompts the court to try again. They are successful on this second attempt. Mather casts the need for a second hanging as an act of God’s providence, for he tells us that her confession revealed that her first attempt at murdering her child was unsuccessful. She needed to be hanged twice for justice to be served, and God, Mather suggests, makes sure justice is carried out. God’s providence appeared in more mundane matters as well. Samuel Sewall’s frustration with having to fix a plugged waterspout transforms into wonder when a rainstorm drenches New England two days later. God, Sewall reasons, intervened to teach him to see the value in steady labor.

Providence tales served key regulatory functions. They cast certain forms of behavior as deviant, then used their own definitions of abnormality as the basis for their argument that the very health of the state required not only government intervention but also that all individuals in the community learn to discipline themselves to prevent such behavior. Perhaps the most famous instance of special providences being used in the attempt to regulate social behavior for political purposes involved Anne Hutchinson, whose practice exposed theological questions about the sources of spiritual authority at the heart of New England Congregationalism and engaged widespread interest in England, where both sides published their versions of the controversy. In 1634, when she was in her early forties, Hutchinson, her husband, and her children emigrated from England to Massachusetts Bay after her minister in England, John Cotton, emigrated to America. Sometime after she arrived in Massachusetts Bay, Hutchinson began a Bible study group in her home. The meetings struck a chord with many, and Hutchinson attracted attention for her understanding of dense religious issues. Some prominent ministers found it threatening to the health of the colony to have a woman assuming such authority over spiritual matters. Indeed, her detractors found her so dangerous they felt she should be treated like an “infection” that might kill the entire community. The disease Hutchinson had unleashed had, according to the unnamed and still unknown author of A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antinomians (1644), “spread so fast” and was so powerful that only “the most wise and mercifull providence of the Lord…prevented it by keeping so many of the Magistrates, and Elders, free from the infection.”⁹ After having failed in private to persuade her to stop speaking at Bible studies, those then in charge of Massachusetts Bay put her on trial. She was tried twice. First, Hutchinson had to defend herself against the charge of sedition, that is, of encouraging open rebellion against the civil and religious authorities. After she was convicted of this charge in civil court, Hutchinson’s church tried her for her religious views. She was again convicted, and she was sentenced to banishment.

In the course of her trials, Hutchinson showed extraordinary knowledge and considerable rhetorical skills. Her accusers fixated on one of her remarks. When asked the source of her knowledge of her own salvation, Hutchinson replied that her direct and immediate communication with God was a signal from God himself. The Congregational authorities believed that God had stopped speaking directly to individuals in such unmediated, perfectly clear ways in modern times. Hutchinson’s opponents viewed her persistence, in spite of numerous opportunities to retract her statement, in claiming (in accordance with the original Lutheran tenets of the Reformation) that God had spoken directly to her, as a sign that God himself was intervening. In their view God would not speak directly to an individual, but He might use an individual as an indirect means of communicating. Such indirect communication required interpretation, but Hutchinson’s opponents were confident in their reading. God himself, they insisted, provided the court with sufficient proof to convict Hutchinson by inducing her to “manifest her opinions” in full view of all the colonists. Those present in court that day had witnessed, according to A Short Story, a “speciall providence of God.”¹⁰ While Hutchinson appeared to be moving her mouth to speak of her own free will, it had really been God himself who, without directly announcing it or manifesting himself in visible form, had moved her mouth to vocalize her beliefs.

In so doing, God signaled, first, that our sense of agency over our own bodies was an illusion. Second, God had used Hutchinson to illustrate the cost of deviating from the theological positions held by the men in charge of Massachusetts Bay. Third, this special providence kept the colony safe by demonstrating the threat women in positions of authority posed to the health of the whole community. The conclusion was that Hutchinson had been sent to New England by God to test the resolve of the New English community’s commitment to biblical principles. The fact that Massachusetts Bay survived – which required nothing short of ridding itself of the infection attacking its body – defined, according to those who opposed Hutchinson, the colonial government as an example of the well-regulated English social body that England herself should heed.

Hutchinson’s declaration of an immediate revelation was not the only incident that her detractors transformed into a providence tale. According to Thomas Weld’s preface to A Short Story, the “monstrous and misshapen” body of the infant Hutchinson bore reflected her “misshapen” opinions. Weld claims that God has “caused the two fomenting women [Hutchinson herself and her supporter Mary Dyer] in the time of the height of the [Controversy] to produce out of their wombs, as before they had out of their braines, such monstrous births as no Chronicle (I thinke) hardly ever recorded the like.” Indeed, Weld asserts that the children’s dead bodies indicate God’s “owne vote and suffrage” on the matter.¹¹ They were, he and others insisted, signs of God’s providence. What was God trying to communicate to his creations in the dead babies’ bodies? According to works published in England by colonists’ supporters, He was indicating that the so-called New England Way had not only successfully rid itself of an infection on the communal body but also, and perhaps more importantly, that in doing so it had shown its capacity to incorporate alien members into that communal body. For Weld’s preface ends by asserting that after the New English authorities had recognized the births as signs of God’s special providence, several Indians had miraculously, and without warning, voluntarily submitted themselves to English rule.

Though authors of providence tales claimed to be merely reporting God’s clear message, they were, in fact, offering a reading of the events they narrated. Other authors would find different meanings in the same series of events. Hutchinson’s and Dyer’s still-births provide cases in point. In Mercurius Americanus,¹² one of Hutchinson’s allies – believed by many to be John Wheelwright – came to precisely the opposite conclusion from Weld. This author cast these still-births as indicators that Puritanism in New England had lost its way. Far from being a sign of the dangerous opinions offered by Hutchinson and Dyer, the offspring of the women’s bodies served as a sign of the cost of inappropriate rule.

Others saw still-births like Hutchinson’s and Dyer’s simply as good copy. Providence tales, in other words, might be told just as easily as wonder tales. Wonder tales focused on the strange, the unusual, and the abnormal. They involved, among many other things, bodily deformations, strange births, giants, sudden storms, and unusual animals or plants. Wonders showed the limits of human understanding by putting categorical crises on display and demonstrating the problems with standard ways of understanding the order of and driving forces behind the natural world. These tales prompted readers to consider just how men’s and women’s bodies were supposed to appear; stories of deformed babies raised the question of exactly what natural forces affected fetal development; and reports of giants in the southernmost parts of the globe produced speculation on the role of the environment in producing human difference. While wonder tales give credit to God, they usually do not offer an interpretation of just what God was trying to communicate in creating these oddities. The wonder tale accentuates God’s unknowability and encourages readers to turn towards human reason and natural causes to interpret the oddities of the world. What some saw as God’s direct intervention into the lives of humans others saw just as clearly as simply an oddity of nature that defied explanation.

Dyer’s still-born child, for instance, became one of the most widely told seventeenth-century stories of so-called “monstrous births.” While New England Puritans continued to cite it well into the eighteenth century as an instance of God’s providence, others saw nothing providential at all in the event. Newes from New England of a most strange and prodigious Birth provides the very basic outlines of the story of Dyer’s still-birth, and it follows this description with brief summaries of five other instances of “monstrous births” in Europe.¹³ The pamphlet concludes by speculating on the causes of such tragedies, but it draws its conclusions by referring to dominant medical treatises of the time, referring, for instance, to Aristotle and Pliny. None of these medical treatises, the pamphlet concludes, provides adequate explanations for the extremely unusual nature of the births, and so the reader is left to marvel at the wonder of the natural world. In this kind of tract, wonder is used more as a marketing gimmick than a way to understand God’s mysterious ways. Tracts like Newes from New England are designed to make money for their producers, and they worked. Wonder tales were extraordinarily popular; they brought popular culture into print as an important medium for transatlantic communication.

While the profits generated through the sales of wonder tales helped give birth to a modern press, such tales also played a role in the development of transatlantic networks of communication that were crucial in the emergence of modern science. From 1712 the New England minister Cotton Mather communicated extensively with members of the Royal Society in London regarding his observations of natural phenomena in America. One letter concerned some remarkable bones found in upstate New York that he and others believed to be those of giants. These bones, Mather contended, were nothing short of wonders that displayed God’s greatness. Mather came to this conclusion by subjecting them to a rigorous analysis that, he believed, was modeled on the most up-to-date methodology of natural philosophers (Mather had read and from the 1680s was much influenced by the English work of Robert Boyle on experimental methodology). While Mather distances himself from the description of the phenomenon (he claims to be forwarding a letter to the Society from a correspondent) it is precisely the kind of information describing strange natural occurrences and objects solicited by the Royal Society. Objects and events previously viewed as demonstrating God’s intervention in the natural order of the world became the data that fueled the scientific revolution, though the presence of scientific and providential epistemologies in a single work was common in the period and, in fact, would continue to be a common feature of various genres well into the future. The two different approaches and epistemologies continued concurrently, not least in Mather’s own writing, and that of Edwards, who was equally committed both to empirical observation and theological explanation.

This transatlantic cooperation and communication on matters of science was only one of several strands which continued to bind New England Puritans to Britain into the eighteenth century. As Francis J. Bremer has shown in Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 and Middlekauf in his compendious biography of the Mathers, Puritan clergy in England and New England gave each other practical political, as well as religious and pietistic, aid, comfort, and support.¹⁴ For instance, several prominent New England Puritans sailed back to fight in Cromwell’s Model Army during the English Civil War (1649–60); and after the Restoration, English Puritans used their interest and contacts at Court to protect the New England community’s independence and way of life from the depredations of Charles II, while the most persecuted of their number in England sailed to New England to settle and minister to congregations there. At the same time, Puritan ministers such as Increase Mather, who had spent several years in studying and ministering in England himself, continued to correspond with English friends and colleagues, as well as to publish providential works and tales of wonder which were designed to get English Puritans on his side in factional New England Puritan disputes. As Stephen Foster has shown in The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture 1570–1700 and Michael Winship in Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment, New England Puritan publications in England helped English Puritans in England after the Restoration to combat Church of England appropriations and alterations of the doctrine of providence and of providential tales.¹⁵ In the process, they embraced some key English issues (such as Church of England suspicion of religious “enthusiasm” or fanaticism, which was blamed retroactively for causing the English Civil War) and accommodated themselves to the times by making Puritan providence tales more rational as well as more personal. Cotton Mather, who like his father regularly published on both sides of the Atlantic, was a central figure here.

Nevertheless, providence tales, wonders, and spiritual autobiographies continued to lend authority to certain ways of organizing and understanding people’s interactions with the material world throughout this period. The weather, the death of a loved one, a cross word said at an inappropriate moment, an unusual birth, the tattered bones of an unidentified being, a shoddy drainpipe, and so forth were part of a vast system of signs whose underlying meaning required diligent study. Such study was not to be done alone, though, but was to take place among a transatlantic community brought together in print and through correspondence by providence tales, wonders, and spiritual autobiographies.

NOTES

1 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1998); Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

2 Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

3 D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

4 David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

5 James D. Hartman, Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

6 Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

7 In Vincent Carretta (ed.), Unchained Voices (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996) and Joanna Brooks (ed.), The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

8 Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. Milton H. Thomas, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973).

9 A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists and Libertines that Infected the Churches of New England (London: for Ralph Smith, 1644), p. 45.

10 Ibid., p. 40.

11 A Short Story, Preface, #5 [p. 13].

12 [John Wheelwright], Mercurius Americanus, Mr. Welds his Antitype (London, 1645).

13 Newes from New England of a most strange and prodigious Birth (London: Printed for John G. Smith, 1642).

14 Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994); Robert Middlekauf, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

15 Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Michael Winship, Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).