Abram Van Engen
In one of his recent his books about the Puritans, the historian David Hall (2011) explained that he first wanted to title it “Why They Mattered” (xi). That desire reveals just how much times have changed. When Hall began his career in the 1960s, the “mattering” of the Puritans was simply assumed. According to influential studies by Perry Miller (1939/1983) and Sacvan Bercovitch (1975/2011), the Puritans were the beginning of all things American – American literature, American history, American expression, American exceptionalism – and books about the Puritans poured from the presses. This trend culminated and ended in Andrew Delbanco’s The Puritan Ordeal (1989), which traced the legacy of Puritan immigrants through Melville into the modern day. In his introduction, Delbanco (1989) described himself as sympathizing with work that focused on “the ideological origins of contemporary culture” because it offered the potential of “nurturing self‐knowledge” (3–4). As Gordon Wood (1989) summarized in the New York Review of Books, Delbanco made “a grasp of Puritanism […] fundamental to an understanding of the meaning of America” (n.p.). For scholars from the 1930s through the 1980s, that was a common assumption and approach.
By 1989, however, studies had begun to shift, questioning the “Puritan origins” thesis, setting the Puritans amidst a much broader array of early American cultures, and calling for a study of these cultures on their own terms, rather than for how they enabled something later, better, and more important to arise. In a representative review essay, David Shields (1993) took joy in a new early American studies “that does away with genealogy, that does not trace the symbolic ancestry of an American mind/self/character/dream, that does not play the connect‐the‐dots game from Raleigh to Smith to Winthrop to Bradstreet to Mather to Franklin and Edwards to Adams and Jefferson to Wheatley and Crèvecoeur to Barlow and Brown” (542). Not only did newer scholars now turn against the American exceptionalism embedded in older works of scholarship, they also rejected a teleological approach that arranged a series of stepping stones leading inevitably from some historical origin to the present day. As Sarah Rivett (2012) remarked on the reissuing of Bercovitch’s The Puritan Origins of the American Self, “Narrative and genealogical histories of America from the colonial period to the present day have become increasingly elusive with the transnational, hemispheric, Atlantic, and comparative conceptual frameworks that we have all come to accept as not only more historically accurate but also politically efficacious” (391).
The result was a transformation of Puritan studies. First, scholars attacked the notion of a unified Puritanism. Beginning with Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (1933), Perry Miller had treated the Puritans as though they all spoke a single mind. In Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (1994), Janice Knight revealed just how much variety and tension the Puritan movement contained. Others, such as Lisa Gordis (2003), have since explored diversities of preaching style, aesthetics, and interpretative habits among Puritan clergymen and laity. Because of such work, some scholars today have become hesitant even to use the term “Puritan,” since it might seem to imply too much ideological coherence for a diverse set of people, and many – especially those focused on puritanism in England – no longer capitalize the “p” in order to indicate that the disunified movement contained multitudes. In addition to revealing a richly variegated Puritanism, scholars have also turned to Puritanism’s transatlantic context and its intercultural relations, signaled especially in Francis Bremer’s important collection (1993).1 Beginning primarily in the 1990s, these discussions emphasized the way politics and cultural formations from England, along with the active and continuing presence of Native Americans, shaped Puritan New England. Once considered a self‐contained laboratory of ideas, Puritanism as studied today challenges scholars to consider these many different contexts and their consequences.
Most recently, scholars have turned back to genealogical studies in a new way, examining how Puritanism has shaped various aspects of American culture while carefully avoiding the exceptionalism that such an approach once engendered and assumed. This newer approach can be seen in at least four recent important studies. Where Protestant piety was once tied crudely to the rise of modern science, Sarah Rivett (2011) offers a careful and detailed account of the relationship between empirical science and Puritan theology. Where Whiggish historians once claimed that Puritans produced democracy and the modern republic, Michael Winship (2012) and David Hall (2011) carefully reconsider and advance the relationship between Puritanism and later politics. And finally, where Max Weber once correlated the Protestant work ethic of Calvinism with the rise of capitalism, Mark Valeri (2010) offers a better account of how devout Puritan merchants negotiated and contributed to the rise of a modern economic order. Joining these endeavors, my first book (2015) likewise tried to establish a link between a Puritan theology of sympathy and the development of American sentimentalism, while my second book, City on a Hill (in press), explains how a mythic Puritan origins story arose, and what purposes it served in later politics. Together, these books have begun to build new, post‐exceptionalist narratives of Puritanism’s influence and effects.
In addition to greater caution, these newer works have also incorporated a more nuanced understanding of religion. The “turn to religion” in literary studies – marked by special journal issues and the rise of “postsecular” studies (Coviello and Hickman 2014; Ebel and Murison 2014; Holsinger 2006; Monta 2009; Stein and Murison 2012) – has reshaped Puritan scholarship as well. Today, scholars more often see the religious and the secular as intimately interwoven, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing but most often advancing together. That is the approach we see in these new genealogies of Hall, Rivett, Valeri, and Winship. Rather than treating religion as a rigid set of dogmas where each doctrinal alteration counts as a decline in faith (the older assumption), these new approaches see Puritans working out solutions with adapted theologies that nonetheless remain theology – a study of God and the world born of belief and devotion. Rivett (2011) makes that point clear in the final paragraph of her book: “Such genres [as the jeremiad, captivity narrative, and conversion narrative] proliferate and adapt formally and thematically throughout late‐eighteenth‐century America, not only because religion maintained its stronghold despite the rise of secular values but also because religion evolves historically with the capacity to negotiate these values” (346). Negotiation, adaptation, and evolution: these are the new terms for the study of religion in early America and the Puritans in particular.
Genealogy, then, might be back. But more work remains to be done. Though we now have much better accounts of the way Puritans were both shaped by and influenced republican politics, new forms of capitalism, and the rise of Enlightenment science, we could do with further study of the relationship between and among various religious traditions. To take one example: how did Puritanism shift in its relation to Anglicanism through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and what effects – in particular, what literary effects – flowed from such developments? We have many studies pointing to the inherent antinomian strain within Puritanism – the idea that anti‐formalist emphases in Calvinism could lead to an individual free‐spiritedness and a rejection of all conventions. But many Puritans and Calvinists leaned the other way (up through, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe). King’s Chapel, the first Anglican church in Boston, was founded in the 1680s and began competing with the Puritan establishment. Brattle Street Church – characterized by a cosmopolitan Congregationalism more in tune with Anglicanism – appeared in the 1690s. Both brought with them a sense that formal practice and religious ritual could be good signs of devotion and piety, and both embodied such beliefs not just through their liturgies but also through their preaching. The power of forms, conventions, and appearances is not static in this period, and the religious beliefs associated with those ideas could have significant effects on literary style and substance.
But Puritanism came face to face with far more than Anglicanism and Brattle Street. Perhaps the next step for Puritan studies is to situate the influence of other religious traditions (Catholic, Quaker, Indigenous, and African, for example) on the Puritan tradition, specifically in relation to the idea and practice of the literary. As with republican politics, modern capitalism, and Enlightenment science, fellow religious traditions played a mutually constitutive role in New England and beyond. Calvinism was not self‐contained. Further studies could build genealogical narratives of influence based on the relationships among varied religious traditions, addressing in particular the way those traditions – through their theologies, ideas, and practices – shaped literature, aesthetics, style, substance, and legacy. Sandra Gustafson’s Eloquence Is Power (2000) offers a good starting point for such work.
How does early America lead to later America? That question was once overdetermined in the 1960s, then rejected in the 1990s, and has now become a question ripe for revisiting. If done well, it can demonstrate for readers beyond early American studies the necessity of understanding colonial developments across periods and fields. There are still more stories to tell, involving book history, institutional histories, and other varieties of influence or effects – all tracking Puritanism from its intercultural and transatlantic beginnings through its constant and contingent negotiation with others into the development of various American cultural forms. Genealogical narratives of origins and influence not only resonate well with a wider reading public; they engage intellectual questions that cannot be approached through other means, and they tie together periods and specialties too often isolated. It seems like a good time to return to big narratives, so long as they are carefully approached.
Most importantly, through the scholarly transformations of Puritanism over the past 30 years, we have come to learn that the Puritan culture of letters was not an isolated incubator for all things “American,” but a complex culture in dialogue with many others, shaped by religious, political, and social factors beyond New England even as distinctive (and sometimes shifting) doctrinal elements – as lived, practiced, and imagined – guided its development. What follows is an attempt to explain these broadly shared doctrinal elements and their effects on the literature of Puritan New England. The way Puritan settlers compared to other colonialisms, the understanding of them in new paradigms of religious change and influence, the internal disagreements and tensions, the contexts of transatlantic and intercultural relations: all of these studies begin in the Puritans’ sense of God and the Puritans’ sense of grace.
In the first of her “Meditations Divine and Moral,” the Puritan writer Anne Bradstreet remarked, “There is no object that we see, no action that we do, no good that we enjoy, no evil that we feel or fear, but we may make some spiritual advantage of all; and he that makes such improvement is wise as well as pious” (1867: 48).2 Making “some spiritual advantage of all” involved a long process of growing in grace, which entailed two central elements in the Puritan culture of letters: the desire to perceive God and, through that perception, the desire to draw near to him. Puritans studied history to see God’s hand at work in the unfolding of his designs. They carefully observed nature because they believed creation reflected the glory of its Creator. They examined their own lives – their afflictions, prosperities, and emotions – in order to determine where they stood in relation to God. They went to sermons to learn about God, and they hoped in the hearing of a sermon to find God speaking to their hearts. And in all of these attempts to perceive God – in their histories, poetry, spiritual autobiographies, sermons, and other writings – they were guided by the Bible, the one sure place where God had revealed himself to all.
Such a desire to perceive God had several significant ramifications. First, Puritans believed that meaning was found, not made. The goal for Puritan writers was not to create something new, but to discover something old. Finding one’s place within the history of the world, for example, meant using God‐given talents of mental acuity to decipher what was happening through the revelations God made in scripture. Even so, attempting to perceive God and fit into godly patterns could require a great deal of creativity. Puritan historians could be contested by other, equally faithful writers who came to different conclusions and interpretations. The same went for preachers: one biblical text might yield two different “doctrines” taught to two different congregations. In other words, while the ethic of discovery certainly entailed a move against invention and originality, it could still involve a good deal of variation and creativity to discover godly patterns.
Second, attempting to perceive God through the world meant that the Puritans could not oppose the material to the spiritual. People with “carnal” desires were those who sought money, fame, or power at the expense of their devotion to God. Certainly these “worldly” people were decried, and many Puritans opposed them by preaching a battle between the worldly and the spiritual, the flesh and the spirit. But more basically, Puritans assumed that God could be known and glorified through the things and people of this earth. The good gifts of creation were considered analogies, similitudes, and lessons in the nature and goodness of the Creator. God had given humans love, for example, so that humans could understand what it means in 1 John 4:8 that “God is love.” In other words, the world was not to be rejected; it was to be enjoyed insofar as it enabled Puritans to understand, appreciate, approach, and experience the God who made it. Importantly, though, all things had to point back to God. An embrace of the material world could become sinful or deadly if it did not finally turn to a worship of God. This is what Puritans meant by “weaned affections.” “Weaning” meant approaching this world in ways that moved one through it to God. When Puritans failed to complete this movement, they believed that God would send afflictions to help them press on – rifts meant to remind one that all of earth’s loves, joys, securities, and delights are transient and ephemeral. Reputations turn; houses burn; lovers die; children perish; one’s health gives way. Each affliction reminds the godly that the good things on earth are certainly meant to be enjoyed as good, but they are also meant to be enjoyed as passing – mere foretastes of a future and eternal happiness.
Finally, this Puritan culture of perception came imbued with an ethics of observation. Puritans were called upon to pay careful attention to the big and the little, the far off and the very near, the outcomes of wars and the events of a single day, the nature of the cosmos and the makeup of an insect. Famous for their self‐examinations (personal spiritual accountings that attempted to mark the progress of one’s soul), Puritans were also called to examine the world around them for signs of God. The inner heart and all its torments, sinful desires, godly affections, and emotional responses might reveal where one stood with God, but getting to know God involved more than just looking within. Such accountings were aided and abetted by studying scripture, gathering with others to hear about God, and observing one’s world carefully. Not all Puritans sustained their spirituality so intensely – many, in fact, did not – but those who did engaged in all of these practices together.
In England, the most devoted “Puritans” could often be identified by their opposition to the broader surrounding culture. “Puritanism” generally designates all those who felt the Church of England needed to be purified of the rituals, structures, and ceremonies that still seemed too Catholic and unbiblical. The practices of worship and piety that Puritans supported distinguished them from others in a variety of ways. Calling themselves “the godly,” Puritans gathered together in their own small groups and Bible studies (called “conventicles”), traveled together to hear good sermons (called “sermon gadding”), studied together in school (especially Emmanuel College in Cambridge), and generally formed tightknit communities opposed to the broader English culture. Such communities turned especially on their sense of God’s grace, which had to be experienced in the heart and would ideally grow throughout one’s Christian life. Puritans gathered together because they wanted to hear how others experienced this grace; they went to good sermons to learn about it and be moved by it; and they opposed the Church of England because they thought its ecclesiastical structures and formal rituals failed to touch and transform people’s hearts.
The degree of disappointment, anger, distancing, or compromise with the Church of England could vary enormously from one Puritan to another. Those who abandoned the Church of England altogether were called Separatists. The “Pilgrims” were of this variety. They had it worse, since leaving the Church of England could be considered an act of treason. Fleeing to Holland first and then to America in 1620, they were a small group, mostly poor, and they landed in a place (Plymouth) where they had no legal right to be. William Bradford became their leader and his account of that experience, Of Plymouth Plantation (written 1630–1651), has since become the most famous and influential piece of Pilgrim writing. The Puritans, meanwhile, arrived in America in 1628 (Salem) and 1630 (Boston) with a large entourage, a decent amount of wealth, a stated intention of remaining in the Church of England, and a handy charter establishing their English right to rule the colony of Massachusetts Bay. John Winthrop was the first governor, and his 1630 “city on a hill” sermon, often called A Model of Christian Charity, is arguably the most famous and influential American Puritan text that survives.
American Puritanism, while deeply attached to the godly communities of England through kinship, friendship, and common cause, began to diverge from English Puritanism following the outbreak of civil war in England in the 1640s. At that time, Parliamentary forces went to battle against King Charles I and his royalist supporters, eventually defeating and executing the king in 1649. When war began, many in America returned to England to fight for the reformation, but at the war’s end, the hoped‐for reformation failed to materialize. Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, which defeated King Charles, included many independent religious sects, and as a result, Cromwell had no desire to institutionalize the New England Way – a church polity that developed through the 1630s and was better suited to the sparsely populated and more homogeneous colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut.
The New England Way, which came to be called Congregationalism, centered on the autonomy and authority of each individual church; these churches, while independent, nonetheless worked together to preach, practice, and guard a specific way of grace. A new church could arise, for example, only when already existing churches extended it the right hand of fellowship. Thus, some degree of uniformity went into the founding and spread of Calvinist churches in New England. At the same time, each church’s minister would be ordained only by the members of that congregation (not bishops, synods, presbyteries, or other denominational structures), and as a result, New England churches would gradually diverge in practice and theology with little check on their individual autonomy. Finally, for most of the seventeenth century, New England churches worked together with the government to exclude the public teaching or practice of various heresies, leading to banishments, whippings, and even the execution of several Quakers in Massachusetts Bay. This system allowed for variety within an overarching common cause.
Membership in the church, meanwhile, frequently required a public accounting of the work of grace in one’s life – a lay conversion narrative, which became its own genre. The practice attempted to separate the presumably saved from all the rest. In Puritan terms, this meant distinguishing the regenerate (the seemingly saved) from the unregenerate (those who might or might not be saved, but who at least did not seem saved yet). Since Puritans believed that God had chosen the elect (the saved, also called the “saints”) and the reprobate (the damned) from before the foundations of the world, salvation meant primarily a search for signs of God’s grace. In keeping with that lifelong search, conversion was not understood to be a singular event, but more of a daily battle, a rooting out of evil from one’s life so that the new life of Christ could flourish. This process was the “spiritual advantage” Bradstreet discussed, called sanctification, whereby those truly called and justified by God would gradually come to know more and more of his grace, looking, feeling, acting, and worshiping increasingly like the “godly.”
Many conversion narratives survive from New England, mainly from the notebooks of a few ministers: Thomas Shepard (1981), John Fiske (1974), Michael Wigglesworth (1965), and Timothy Edwards. In addition, the missionary John Eliot recorded the lay testimonies of several Native converts (Clark 2003). Recently, the Congregational Library in Boston has uncovered, transcribed, and digitized record books from many New England Congregational churches, several of which include conversion narratives that have almost never before been studied.3 Beyond lay conversion narratives, several diaries and autobiographies exist. Almost all English inhabitants of New England were trained to read as part of their spiritual formation (they had to read scripture, for example), but not all were trained to write, nor did many have the time or means. Moreover, while all speak to providence in various ways, the lay diaries engage spiritual experiences less often than the diaries of ministers, reminding us of the variety and breadth of Puritan culture in New England. Spiritual passion and Calvinist doctrine persisted throughout the era, but individual Puritans responded in different ways to a godly culture, some embracing it with intensity, others engaging it with intensity at times, and others finding ways to get by without needing to give God or grace a great deal of thought.
Much has been said about this large base of Puritan life writing. In The Puritan Conversion Narrative (1983), Patricia Caldwell called lay conversions the beginning of American expression – the first American genre. Others have attributed the rise of fiction to the tradition of Puritan spiritual autobiography, arguing that Daniel Defoe transformed such writing into the modern novel. But perhaps the most interesting and sustained feature of these Puritan self‐examinations is the tension that tears at them between self‐denigration and self‐exaltation. Puritans practiced a spirituality that attempted to lower oneself in order to be raised by the Holy Spirit. The powerful minister Thomas Shepard taught that sanctification required dying to oneself (mortification) in order that a new, redeemed self might come to life (vivification), which entailed a daily process of conversion (no singular event or experience of being “born again”). Threading through the Puritan culture of letters, then, is a self‐abnegation that exalts: a kind of disappearing, all‐consuming ego. On the one hand, the particular self must be molded into the patterns of a godly life in order for evidence of salvation to appear. Making oneself look like other seemingly saved souls – matching the pattern of a generic saved “saint” – was the best way to find assurance of salvation. On the other hand, to be saved one had to remain distinct. Salvation was not a melting away of identity, but an eternal judgment pronounced on each individual soul standing naked before God. Thus, many examined their lives – and wrote their lives – to fit the usual way God dispensed grace to the saved, while also adding enough detail to distinguish their own experience. In this way, Puritan self‐examinations end up looking both formulaic and unique.
The “formulas” for self‐examination came about through sermons, devotional literature, and personal readings of scripture. Puritans inhabited several “story frameworks,” such as “the movement from captivity to ‘deliverance,’ from sin to redemption, from weakness and defeat to triumph,” that influenced how they both experienced and interpreted the stories of their lives (Hall 1989: 18). Moreover, scripture contained not just narrative frameworks, but actual stories – hundreds of them – that could be used to match one’s spiritual and personal experiences to biblical tales. In that sense, Puritan spirituality was inherently intertextual: it involved building a narrative of grace out of one’s experiences as interpreted through the stories one heard, all guided by sanctioned narrative frameworks. It is no accident that when Mary Rowlandson wrote her best‐selling and influential captivity narrative in 1682, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, she leaned on the genre of spiritual autobiography and interpreted her experience by intermixing what she described with scriptural verses and tales, comparing herself to Lot’s wife, Job, David, and others.
The fact that lives might be fitted into genres or explained by biblical tales created further tensions in a religion that attempted at all times to root out hypocrisy. Puritans were rigorously anti‐formal. They opposed pre‐written prayers (including all those in the Book of Common Prayer), ritualistic worship, or any other forms of devotion that might substitute for an engaged heart. And yet, the elaborately detailed descriptions of God’s grace that appeared in sermons and catechisms created a form – a “morphology of conversion” – that Puritan individuals would then aspire to match (Morgan 1963: 72). Thus, the lay conversion narratives of Thomas Shepard’s church often sound very similar to one another. Edward Hall, the first recorded narrative in Shepard’s notebook, sets the pattern. It begins: “The first means of his good was Mr. Glover’s ministry whereby he saw his misery from Jeremiah 7 […] and that he was without Christ.” Here we have a classic example of ingredients necessary for a successful conversion in Shepard’s church. Scripture, as applied by a sermon, becomes the “means of grace” that initially reveals to Edward Hall his misery. Only those who know they are sick will seek out a doctor, the Puritans emphasized. Under the preaching of Shepard, Edward Hall “saw more of his misery,” which enabled him to realize “that without [Christ] he must perish.” A new scripture, another sermon, showed Hall “how freely Christ was offered and hereby the Lord did stay and comfort his spirit and so was stirred up with more vehemency to seek Christ.” Before clearly feeling that Christ has saved him, however, Edward Hall falls back into fears and humblings, sensing himself too worldly, his heart “not deep enough” for Christ. The testimony concludes: “But hearing the Lord was willing to take away his enmity, he by Rev. 22:17 was brought nearer to the Lord” (Hall 2004: 120–121). There is no resounding declaration of saving grace, but rather an expression of hope based in the experience of drawing near to God through the constant awareness of failures, miseries, and even enmities toward God. Edward Hall’s conversion narrative is typical of those delivered in Shepard’s church, and it matches the “morphology of conversion” that Shepard regularly preached.
The life of grace Edward Hall describes, along with the way Puritan sermon culture shaped such experiences, can best be described by a sine curve. Picture a graph with a single wave endlessly rising and falling across the x‐axis. That is the Puritan life. The ascent of each wave was called comfort, or assurance, and that came from believing Christ had substituted himself for the punishment and damnation one deserved. Rising in assurance, individual Puritans began to commune with Christ through their desire for him, their belief that he had personally died for their sins, and the increasing sense of his loveliness and holiness. This could sometimes constitute an intense religious experience, often described in scriptural language as “joy unspeakable”; at other times it might just be a stronger‐than‐usual sense of drawing near to God. But then the wave would peak, and one would begin to sink. The downward turn of the sanctified life occurred precisely because of its ascent: the fact that Christ died for individual Puritans made them realize the depths of their ingratitude. And the more they saw of their sin and misery, the further they would fall into what Puritans called humiliation, a godly sorrow and anxiety: after all I have done, after all my disbelief, could Christ really have died for me? Yet just as sorrow seemed about to sink their souls, the minister’s preaching, personal prayers, and the fellowship of the godly community would begin to convince individuals that, yes, even this degree of sin has been covered. Christ died for me. They would begin to rise again. Unlike an actual sine curve, however, the peaks and troughs of Puritan sanctification were not intended to be the same height and depth each time. Every peak should rise a little higher, and every trough should dip a little deeper. The more Puritans realized how badly they had sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, the more amazed, assured, and comforted they would be that Christ loved them and had died for them; and the more they saw of Christ’s beauty and grace and glory, the more they would realize how just how far short of the glory of God they had fallen. The lows sink as the highs rise. And on it would go, drawing nearer and nearer to God, until one day each of the elect would die into what the Puritans called glorification – the moment when assurance changes into certainty. No Puritan life ever mechanically followed this graph, but the idea behind it served as a guide to many.4
That guide came to most Puritans through their preachers, and it directed how those preachers pastored their flocks. Ministers had to keep each individual and congregation moving up and down through the life of sanctification, preventing them from the twin extremes of either security or despair. Every sermon therefore stressed whichever side was needed most – whether comfort or sorrow. If congregations seemed to be moving too much toward security (the sin of turning assurance into complacency), preachers administered the Law, listing sins and failures while threatening the wrath of God. Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) attempts to awaken people from complacency in this vein. But that sermon was only half of the equation for Edwards and for all other Puritan ministers. For if congregants seemed to be approaching despair (the sin of believing oneself beyond the possibility of salvation), then preachers administered the Gospel, the comfort of grace. Faced with parishioners near despair, Puritan ministers would frequently insist that even the dimmest beginning of a mere desire to believe constituted a good sign that the seed of grace had taken root and would grow into salvation. The bruised reed, they liked to say, would not be broken; God would not snuff out the smoking flax.
Anxiety and assurance, the sorrow of sin and the comfort of Christ, the law and the gospel – this was the Puritan way of grace. Such guidelines were accepted by most who professed themselves the “godly,” but each minister had his own way of applying it, his own style from the pulpit. Some, like Thomas Hooker of Hartford, dwelt in the terrors of hell, thinking the greatest fear would produce the best piety and comfort. Others, like John Cotton of Boston, tried to speak more often of the “joy unspeakable,” the great mystery of union with Christ, thinking that if their words waded into grace then their hearers, moved by the Holy Spirit, would follow. The differences, however, can be exaggerated, since Cotton, Hooker, and other leading ministers could preach sermons that tapped into each strand of Puritan emphasis depending on the needs of the congregation.
What is clear from the preaching, however, is just how literary their sermons could be. Preaching the comfort of Christ, for example, Hooker declared, “Thy sorrows outbid thy heart, thy fears outbid thy sorrows, and thy thoughts go beyond thy fears; and yet here is the comfort of a poor soul: in all his misery and wretchedness, the mercy of the Lord outbids all these, whatsoever may, can, or shall befall thee.” Notice the parallelism, the power of repetition, the amplification from “may” to “can” to “shall” that builds an experience of assurance. And listen to him from the same sermon preaching again about assurance, now from the Holy Spirit: “The Spirit doth not only with truth bring home the evidence to the heart, but it is still whispering, and calling, and making known the same, and forcibly soaketh in the relish of the freeness of God’s grace, and leaveth a dint of supernatural virtue upon the soul.” The prepositional phrases in the end produce a kind of chanting rhythm, an experience of the soaking‐in of the Spirit which has again been amplified from whispering to calling to making known to finally flooding a soul. Hooker was a master of these devices as well as a skilled craftsman of metaphors, images, and similes. Explaining the necessity of true remorse in a contrite soul, Hooker preached, “A sinner will never part with his sin; a bare conviction of sin doth but light the candle to see sin; compunction [remorse] burns his fingers, and that only [i.e. that alone] makes him dread the fire” (Hall 2004: 80, 83, 86–87). An everyday candle illuminates the difference between intellectual conviction and felt remorse, tied finally and subtly to the fires of hell. Candles, shackles, knives, doors, windows, brides, weddings, farming equipment – these and many other homely images and metaphors threaded through the preaching of Hooker and his peers.
For Puritans, the Holy Spirit lived in scripture and the words of godly sermons. And when the preacher’s sermon became effective, when someone was touched or moved, the preacher himself was supposed to fade from view. The technical term for a successful experience generated by a sermon was “the demonstration of the Holy Spirit.” Puritans lived with the paradox of having “famous” ministers who were not supposed to be famous, since good sermons glorified God, not preachers. That paradox helps explain some of the aesthetic choices framing Puritan sermons and the Puritan culture of letters more generally. Puritans considered writing that drew attention to itself to be ornamental, and ornamentation was never good. It distracted attention from God and exalted the preacher. For example, the Puritans disliked Anglican ministers who quoted extensively from classical literature, sometimes in Latin or Greek; such a practice, they believed, simply announced to the congregation how much the minister had read and how much he knew. In response, the Puritans developed an aesthetic called the “plain style,” which as Hooker’s preaching demonstrates could be very rhetorical and rhythmic, could lean heavily on imagery, metaphor, and simile – could be, in short, quite beautiful – but was distinguished from alternatives by the idea that the words were not meant to draw attention to themselves: all should aim at drawing hearers nearer to God. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is called the Word of God, and Puritans believed that the Word of God dwelt in the words of scripture, which the language of sermons explicated and applied. That is what made sermons the most consistent “means of grace”: a mediation of God’s direct communication to sinners and saints that came again and again (the average Puritan heard nearly seven thousand sermons in a lifetime). Ideally, the means of mediation – the words themselves – would become as transparent as the preachers in the process.
The range of emphases within Puritan preaching found its remarkable variety unified by a basic sermonic pattern. Puritan sermons would begin with scripture (usually a single verse), called the sermon’s text; they would then explicate the passage, setting it within its biblical and historical context; that explication would produce a doctrine (a proposition to guide the sermon); the minister would then give reasons to explain the doctrine’s meaning and its many ramifications; from there the minister would apply the doctrine through a series of uses; and finally, the minister would exhort the congregation to embrace the doctrine and its uses, attempting to stir affections and move hearts. Some ministers wove exhortation throughout the sermon; others offered more rational disquisitions that ended in rousing calls for reform. Either way, sermons were never meant to be dry. An unmoved congregant could be considered dead in the spirit, untouched and perhaps unwanted by God. The variations within the form were many, but the accepted pattern of the sermon constituted its own specific genre – its own set of expectations and conventions. To skip any of the necessary steps in a sermon would be to confuse the congregation, who came to church not to be puzzled, but to be moved, challenged, and edified.
Within the broad genre of sermons were many subgenres. Thursday lectures might attempt more to teach doctrine than to move listeners. Special days of Fasting and Thanksgiving, commissioned by the government, culminated in their own types of sermons. Funeral and execution sermons would direct the message and content toward mourning, consolation, and the lessons to be learned in one’s own approaching death. Finally, Puritans in New England also practiced an annual Election Sermon preached on the day of elections and directed at the civic community as a whole. By the latter half of the seventeenth century, many of these Election Sermons would be printed, and many would take the form of a jeremiad: an account of the glorious days that the first immigrants experienced, a narrative of piety’s decline since then and God’s ensuing punishment, a call for renewal and repentance, and the holding out of a day of grace – a weighty choice between continuing one’s decline or turning to repentance and renewal. Much has been made of the jeremiads and their effect on American culture, but reading those sermons in isolation from the many unprinted weekly sermons would give a false sense of the genre as a whole. Election sermons were a subgenre and special form of sermon directed much more broadly than what Puritans encountered on a regular basis.
The twin aims of perceiving God and drawing near to him shaped not just sermons and spiritual autobiographies, but also a good deal of Puritan poetry. Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor are recognized as the best Puritan poets, while Michael Wigglesworth was the most widely read. Bradstreet’s poetry often appears simple, but that simplicity masks surprising complexity as she moves through multiple perspectives and moods, many combined in a single line. Her more lyrical poems (the most anthologized ones) often tease out relations between heaven and earth. When the house she has loved burns to the ground in 1666, for example, Bradstreet turns from it to God – leaving the material behind for the spiritual – but the poem is fraught with longing for her lost home. In this way, Bradstreet both expresses and troubles simplistic piety. In “Upon the Burning of Our House” (Bradstreet 1967: 292–293) that tension emerges most clearly in the simple fact of its continuation. Early couplets represent what could be a pious close to an easy poem: “And when I could no longer look, / I blest His name that gave and took.” But each time the poem suggests an ending, it does not end. Bradstreet reiterates and then lovingly details exactly what God has taken from her. Accusation, anger, and resistance become embedded in expressions of piety. What enables the speaker finally to resign herself to God is the thought that she has “an house on high erect.” The joy she anticipates, in other words, is based on the joy she has known. The love of her lost house – so evidently on display in the poem – becomes the very thing that enables her to turn from it to God. Even so, by the end she has not entirely turned: “The world no longer let me love, / My hope and treasure lie above.” That “let” is a plea and prayer sending the speaker (and the reader) back to the beginning of the poem in an attempt to fulfill the prayer’s request.
Such an ending reveals two central aspects to Bradstreet’s poetry. First, her lyrical poems are often processes; and second, the final lines often do not finish the process. Her poems of loss, for example, often powerfully express the very grieving they are meant to relieve. “Blest babe, why should I once bewail they fate,” she asks of an infant in her poem “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet” (Bradstreet 1967: 235). On the one hand, it is a pious statement meant to provide consolation in the belief that the baby has gone to heaven; on the other hand, it is a register of grief, an expression of the very “bewailing” that the poem tries to move past. In that sense, Bradstreet’s lyrical poems – like her meditations – often act like spiritual disciplines: each reading is a reliving and a reprocessing of the heart’s affections in an attempt to move one closer to God.
But the lyrical poems are not the only ones Bradstreet wrote. Traditionally, Bradstreet’s oeuvre has been divided between the putatively public, imitative, earlier poetry of The Tenth Muse (her first book, published in 1650) and her more domestic, personal, later lyrics (appearing for the first time posthumously in 1678). These distinctions, however, have been increasingly challenged: for example, the sense of an “early” and a “late” Bradstreet arises from what editors chose to print in The Tenth Muse rather than from what Bradstreet was actually writing. In The Tenth Muse, Bradstreet self‐consciously competed with male peers in a broad literary public sphere. The packaging, editing, framing, and publishing of Bradstreet’s poetry (first in London, then in Boston) has opened debates about the multiple possible ways her verse attempts to enter, define, use, and challenge this literary public sphere. Robert Daly (1993), for example, proposed that Bradstreet first demonstrated “her ability to play the game as it was then conceived” in The Tenth Muse, then began “to change the rules of the game” with her later verse (16). The first two scholars to turn serious attention to Bradstreet’s more “public” poetry in The Tenth Muse were Ivy Schweitzer (1988, 1991) and Timothy Sweet (1988). In my own article (2011), I review this debate and its shifting contours, trying to understand how “public” and “private” could be defined in this era (especially in relation to one another), and how Bradstreet might have used her more public status as a well‐regarded poet to draw attention to domestic matters. However one understands the “public” literary sphere at this time, it is clear that Bradstreet had ambitions to enter it. In other words, Bradstreet’s poetry – and much of the Puritan culture of letters more generally – is best read both within and beyond the doctrines, beliefs, and practices of Puritanism per se. These texts must be set within a larger transatlantic and early modern context.
That context begins to reveal the ways Bradstreet directly engages the publicity of her voice as a female poet. “The Prologue” of The Tenth Muse (1650) stages a demure woman ceding territory to male superiors in a manner that simultaneously undermines the speaker’s claim to female inferiority. The language of modesty in the poem continually collapses, even as it opens a space for Bradstreet to speak. Not only does the poem undercut itself; the book that follows contradicts the prologue’s first lines: “To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings, / Of cities founded, commonwealths begun, / For my mean pen are too superior things” (Bradstreet 1967: 15). Despite such lines, The Tenth Muse goes on to do just that, laying out (among other things) a whole rhyming history of “Four Monarchies.” The modesty trope of “The Prologue” thus becomes a conventional device demonstrating from the opening poem Bradstreet’s vast knowledge of poetic traditions. Grasping that “The Prologue” is in fact a prologue – an opening to a whole book – can help scholars read The Tenth Muse as a unified artwork commenting back on itself. While much has been said about particular Bradstreet poems, much less has been done to examine how they relate or how they build unified arrangements in either The Tenth Muse (1650) or her second collection, Several Poems (1678), though a good starting point can be found in Gillian Wright’s Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600–1730 (2013).
Edward Taylor’s poetry raises considerably different questions about Puritanism and the literary public sphere, and not just because of gender. Taylor never printed his poems and we have no evidence that he shared them. Certainly he cared about his poems, producing a fair copy of all he had written in 1691. But what exactly Taylor was up to has been a point of mystery and intrigue for many scholars ever since his poetry was first discovered in the 1930s. Like Bradstreet, Taylor wrote many poems of process, emphasizing the idea that poetry served as a training ground for the affections. The bulk of his poems were preparatory meditations meant to make him ready, as a minister, for the administration of the Lord’s Supper – one of only two sacraments for Puritans. Taylor’s poems are most often attempts to shape the heart. He often takes his failings and tries to transform them by clothing himself in Christ, substituting Christ’s identity for his own even as he remains present enough in the poem to offer up his praise. The particular failure that recurs most frequently in Taylor’s poetry is one of praise – a failure of expression, or a statement of ineffability – caused by the flaws of the heart. As Wilson Brissett (2009) aptly reminds us in a foundational essay for the study of Puritan aesthetics, statements about ineffability and the inadequacy of language in Taylor’s poetry “always instantiates a greater sense of loss to be located in the brokenness of the human soul before God” (462). Getting the heart right, therefore, ideally produces a kind of eloquence – and that is what many poems attempt to accomplish through a process of transforming the affections.
But getting the heart right for Taylor was not just a private, personal matter. Following the advice of Puritan preaching manuals, Taylor seems to have been attempting to find the proper framework of godly affections so that those affections would be transmitted to his congregants in worship. In other words, while seemingly private, the poetry served a deeply communal function. The particular and the generic, the personal and the communal, constantly intermingle in a Puritan culture of letters. Even the most seemingly private of poets – one who never published his poems and perhaps never even shared them – writes according to the idea that a saved self fits a model of salvation that joins in the communion of saints.
Bradstreet and Taylor are the best and most studied New England Puritan poets, but the most famous Puritan poet in his own day was Michael Wigglesworth. His Day of Doom (1662), warning sinners about the coming day of judgment while consoling them with the promise of Christ’s redemption, sold immensely. The popularity of Wigglesworth reminds us that, as Jeffrey Hammond (1993) comments, “There was a Puritan way of reading, and it was not like ours. […] Puritans were not merely content with their poetry but seem to have delighted in its didacticism and conventionality – the very qualities that distance the texts from us” (x). The popularity of Wigglesworth also demonstrates an investment in an emotional aesthetics that gets lost when scholars attempt to untangle the unities, ironies, or wordplays of a given poem. Much like Puritan preaching, Puritan poetry succeeded when it touched the heart. Readers were evidently moved by Wigglesworth’s poetry and that was enough, demonstrating not just a different model of reading but also how much an embrace of doctrine could matter to the affections, as well as to literary content and technique. For Puritans, doctrine was not a rational affair, but a lived affair; and when Wigglesworth brought home the great terror and hope embedded in the beliefs of his listeners, he found himself a household name.
Wigglesworth’s poetry reveals another important dimension to the Puritan culture of letters: the best‐selling works in a Puritan culture of letters were most frequently books of practical divinity. The Practice of Piety (1612) by Lewis Bayly, for example, went through multiple editions. The Puritans wanted to know how to live what they believed, and they read many instructional manuals on piety. As David Hall (1989) has pointed out, “Steady sellers (and the Bible) were key vehicles of culture, transmitting to a general readership the essence of a cultural tradition; in their format, as in how they were appropriated, they both shaped and strengthened an interpretive community” (52). These manuals have been the purview of historians and religious studies scholars for a long while, but they have seldom been approached from the angle of literary criticism. The four most reprinted devotional works of the seventeenth century – and thus some of the most widely read texts in the era – were Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601), Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety (1612), Samuel Smith’s Great Assize (1617), and Henry Scudder’s The Christian’s Daily Walke (1627). These names and titles yield almost no results in the MLA International Bibliography database, indicating that literary scholars have left them virtually untouched. Yet The Practice of Piety and its imitators were all pieces of literature, employing literary techniques and utilizing literary forms even within an anti‐formal religion – all to achieve the goal of bolstering a lived religion in their readers. Though they were often written and published in England, they were read voraciously by New England Puritans. How they functioned as literature would be worth exploring much more fully.
Puritan sermons, autobiographies, and poems all function as genres operating between the individual and the communal, shaping and linking a single soul or heart to the civic community and the communion of saints. Puritan histories, meanwhile, extended the premise of God’s sovereignty explicitly to the fortunes and failures of communities as a whole. For Puritan historians, nothing could happen apart from God’s will. Yet that will was not always easy to determine. Prosperity might indicate God’s blessing for one’s faithfulness, or it might indicate God’s distance – leaving someone in sin because God did not care enough to chastise or correct. Afflictions, likewise, could be seen as punishments for specific sins or as unprompted trials sent to test and strengthen one’s faith (like Job in the Old Testament). Either way, every event reflected the will of God, and if carefully observed and interpreted, they could be opened as revelations.
Searching for the will of God meant fitting one’s life and community into a grand narrative of redemption that began in Creation and extended through the Fall to the choosing of the Israelites, the incarnation of Christ, Jesus’s death and resurrection, the early church, and the life of the true church ever since (which was considered largely hidden during the reign of Catholicism). God was working through these channels for the redemption of the world and the salvation of his elect. As such, all of history headed toward its endpoint – the second coming of Christ and the final day of judgment. Given this grand narrative, Puritans could find themselves and their community always existing within the framework of a much larger – even cosmic – plot. And the way in which they fitted themselves into that plot was through a technique called typology.
Typology is a specific way of viewing history and one’s relation to it. It began as a practice of linking the Old Testament to the New, then continued as a way of linking biblical time to the present. So, for example, Abraham’s near sacrifice of his only son, Isaac, in Genesis prefigures God’s sacrifice of His only son, Jesus, in the gospels. The second, later event (Christ’s death) both repeats and fulfills the earlier. In the same way, the Puritan sense of history involved repetition and fulfillment. Rather than picturing time as a straight line, typology structured it as, in effect, an expanding spiral. Locating oneself on this spiral meant identifying the parallels, or repetitions, between oneself and biblical figures while also reading into that alignment a sense of God’s continued work in history. So, for example, some New England Puritans drew parallels between their experience and Israel, having undergone their own “exodus” from England to a new “promised land” – repeating biblical paradigms of history while helping to extend the Kingdom of God outward. Cotton Mather, in his influential history of New England, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), famously called his biography of Winthrop “Nehemias Americanus” – the new version of the Old Testament Israelite leader Nehemiah, who led the captive Israelites out of Babylon to Jerusalem. This could be a nationally exclusive vision, later founding a strain of American exceptionalism, or, more often, it could be an inclusive concept – an extension of God’s Kingdom that valorized the godly in all parts of the world who were typologically advancing the Kingdom of God wherever they happened to live.
The advances and setbacks in New England were additionally understood within the pervasive terms of covenantal relations. The covenant of works was established with Adam at creation; in that conditional covenant, God would reward Adam’s perfect obedience with salvation and blessing. But the Fall broke the covenant of works and no one afterward could live up to its demands. Sin was inescapable – not just a deed committed, but as a tendency of the heart, a hatred of God that came with birth (called original sin). The only solution was the covenant of grace, whereby God substituted Christ’s death for the punishment sinners deserved and imputed Christ’s righteousness to them through faith. In effect, when God looked at the faithful and the godly, he saw in them his beloved son, Jesus Christ, which covered all their sins and failings. Such grace could be had only as a gift from God granted through faith. Calvinism removed any sense of reward or merit for good works (even the “work” of believing was itself a gift of the Holy Spirit). That did not rule out obedience and godly living – which were understood as the natural results and signs of grace, responses of gratitude for deliverance – but for individuals, the only covenant that truly mattered was the covenant of grace.
Communally, however, the covenant of works still held explanatory power. There is no eternal life for a nation, a colony, or a town. For godly communities, therefore, the covenant of works returned as a contractual promise on the people’s part to follow God’s ways, in return for which God promised prosperity and well‐being. In A Model of Christian Charity (1630), Governor John Winthrop famously declared: “Thus stands the cause between God and us, we are entered into covenant with him for this work.” If the people remained faithful, God would respond with “favor and blessing”; but if they failed, warned Winthrop, “the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us” (Hall 2004: 169). In keeping with this way of thinking, Puritan histories often traced the blessings and afflictions of God in relation to the people’s faithfulness or failures. And when afflictions began arising regularly in the late seventeenth century – especially in the form of a devastating war against a powerful alliance of Native American nations – many Puritan historians interpreted the events specifically as a call for repentance. The famous Boston minister Increase Mather led the way with A Brief History of the War with the Indians (1676), where the key to victory (and the explanation of defeats) hinged on faith, repentance, and covenant renewal, rather than military strategy or strength. But Mather was not the only historian trying to find God’s meaning. The war’s conclusion caused a huge outbreak of historical writing attempting to determine the proper interpretation of the struggle and its consequences in the light of New England’s special relation to God.
Similarly, when the Salem witch hunt broke out, Cotton Mather (Increase’s equally influential son) read the events within the context of a cosmic battle being waged between God and Satan for the territory and souls of New England. Since Cotton Mather believed the successful prosecution of witches was good evidence of godliness, he did not approach the trials primarily through the rhetoric of failure or the need for repentance (as his father had approached King Philip’s War), but rather as the inevitable result of successfully spreading God’s kingdom into a “wilderness” once owned and controlled by the devil. As with King Philip’s War, however, Salem also generated many competing interpretations. God’s presence in history was taken for granted by Puritans, but the specific will of God as revealed in particular events could be widely contested. Puritans did not speak with a single mind, and sometimes the most prominent Puritans (like Increase and Cotton Mather) were also the ones most attacked by their peers. Thus, Cotton Mather’s account of Salem, called Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), was answered and ridiculed by another Bostonian in a book called More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700). But Cotton Mather himself should not be thought of as a parochial, narrow‐minded minister. More and more work has emphasized his cosmopolitan breadth and his positioning of New England within a global order that did not make America exceptional, but instead integrated New Englanders into international law (Goodman 2018) and the worldwide communion of saints (Stievermann 2016). In that sense, Wonders of the Invisible World should be considered the exception, not the norm, and its focus on New England needs to be balanced with his lifelong interest in world affairs.
Mather’s book on Salem, along with its depiction of the American “wilderness,” raises yet another deep‐rooted issue in Puritan writing: Puritan historians grappled with how to position and represent Indigenous peoples in their accounts of New England. Were they to be seen as the scourge of God and the servants of the devil (as Mather portrayed them), or a field ripe for harvesting? In the 1640s and 1650s, the latter view began to take hold. Edward Johnson’s 1651 history of New England, The Wonder‐Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New‐England, used military imagery to claim that New England Puritans were Christ’s vanguard, soldiers marching in the light of God for true reformation. He detailed the rise of towns across the region as God’s special blessing. And in the process, he captured the growing sense that the transformation and redemption of the “wilderness” was the very sign that New England and its people were peculiarly blessed. It was around this time and in this context that the Puritans turned serious attention to missionary work. If the Indians became Christian, it would validate the Puritan presence in a strange land, for they were extending the Kingdom of God and possibly heralding its final culmination. From 1644 to 1671, the leading missionary, John Eliot, published with others a series of missionary tracts, pamphlets, and letters all detailing the goals and achievements of their work among the Indians. Now collected, edited, and available in a modern edition called The Eliot Tracts (2003) by Michael Clark, these texts not only reveal the way Puritans viewed their Native neighbors; they also show how Native Americans functioned for Puritans as a statement of their purpose in New England and a transatlantic signifier of their importance in the eyes of God. Ostensibly focused on Native conversions, the “Eliot Tracts” can be read as primarily about the Puritans themselves. Even so, literary scholars such as Kristina Bross (2004) and Laura Stevens (2004) have found the strange form and incoherence in these tracts a rich site for recovering Native voices and Native responses to the Puritans in their midst.
Puritan histories had a wide range – everything from retrospective accounts organized cogently by a driving sense of God’s determined will to more incoherent recordings of recent events grasping at God’s meaning. (Indeed, William Bradford’s famous book, Of Plymouth Plantation, seems to combine both approaches.) In their attempts to offer competing accounts of God’s sovereign hand at work in history, Puritan historians contributed a significant genre to the Puritan culture of letters and left a lasting impact on historical writing in New England for many years to come. The larger typological framework and the sense of a grand and cosmic plan of redemption encouraged an ethics of historical observation that made Puritan historians pay careful attention to events in their own locales as well as across the world, attempting to decipher how all events added up to God’s will and God’s way. In that sense, histories joined other genres in the Puritan attempt to perceive more of God and, through that process, to draw nearer to him. That first reflection of Anne Bradstreet in her Meditations Divine and Moral – “There is no object that we see, no action that we do, no good that we enjoy, no evil that we feel or fear, but we may make some spiritual advantage of all; and he that makes such improvement is wise as well as pious” (1867: 48) – summarizes well the devotional culture of observation and perception that consequently motivated a massive and influential Puritan culture of letters.
See also: chapter 2 (cross‐cultural encounters in early american literatures); chapter 3 (settlement literatures before and beyond the stories of nations); chapter 5 (writing the salem witch trials); chapter 6 (captivity); chapter 13 (the varieties of religious expression in early american literature).