puritanism in american literature essay

Postexceptionalist Puritanism

Sarah Rivett is professor of English and American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2011) and Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017).

Abram Van Engen is associate professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow-Feeling in Early New England (Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), and his second book, The Meaning of America: How the United States Became the City on a Hill , is under contract with Yale University Press.

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Sarah Rivett , Abram Van Engen; Postexceptionalist Puritanism. American Literature 1 December 2018; 90 (4): 675–692. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7208500

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Since she came hither, she hath found her heart more dead and dull, etc., and being in much sickness when she came first into the land, she saw how vain a thing it was to put confidence in any creature. But yet it wrought some discontent in her own spirit, but [she] hath since witnessed the Lord’s love to her. Sometime a heart to run and sometime to sit still in the Lord’s way. —Elizabeth Olbon, “The Confessions” (1638–45)

In the 1630s thousands of men, women, and children—like Elizabeth Olbon—left England’s eastern shores for New England. These individuals were already migrants. They had, in all likelihood, moved at least once in their lives to escape religious persecution and to fulfill a religious ideal in a less encumbered setting. These religious migrants have become known as the Puritans, a group of people loosely defined through a shared and often zealous adherence to the reformed theological tradition, largely following the work of John Calvin. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Puritan movement took root in specific regional locales throughout Germany, Scotland, the Low Countries, and England. Religious conflict simmered from the 1580s forward and intensified during the reign of Charles I (1625–49) as Puritans repeatedly called for further reform, often through appeals to the early church and antiquity. Religious and political tension and persecution caused groups of Puritans to leave England in search of new lands and communities.

What has become known as the Great Puritan Migration of 1630 epitomized these migratory patterns as nearly twenty thousand individuals made the arduous Atlantic crossing for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Comparatively speaking, this was a significant but relatively small chapter in a much larger story of Atlantic transit. Nearly half a million Britons migrated to Ireland, North America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa in the seventeenth century. The religious landscape peppering migratory patterns was much more diverse than the monolith of Puritan studies has traditionally made it out to be. Quakers, Anglicans, and Catholics also settled the coast of North America, while a string of Spanish missions stretched from St. Augustine, Florida, to the California coast. French Jesuits and Recollect clergy settled in the Saint Lawrence River area, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi valley to establish a French Catholic culture in Native American villages. Yet, the “Great Puritan Migration” still looms large in the US cultural imaginary as one of the myths of the nation’s founding. While the arc from the Puritans to the present day has been deemed too teleological and singular in our scholarship, it is still alive and well in the popular imagination. It is thus imperative that the field of Puritan studies be continuously reinvigorated rather than forgotten. For as much as we rightly disavow the Puritan “origins thesis” on intellectual grounds, the mythology of and desire for an American beginning will persist as an integral facet for the students we teach and the world we live in.

The aim of this special issue is to reflect on the place of Puritan studies within the fields and genealogies of American literature. By titling the issue “Postexceptionalist Puritanism,” we wish to make clear that this is in no sense an argument for the revival of old paradigms. Rather, the essays included herein have absorbed the lessons of Atlantic, transnational, and comparative approaches. In so doing, they also seek to construct new intellectual histories and literary genealogies that plot fragmentation, epistemic rupture, and discontinuity as integral facets of American literary beginnings. As Olbon’s “Confessions” ( 1994 ) makes clear, New England arrivals were seldom filled with a sense of millennial fulfillment. Rather they experienced physical and emotional sickness, “discontent,” and even despair. Finding assurance of grace was arduous work, as was surviving in a new land so far from home. On the one hand, Pilgrims and Puritans arrived in the New World with a sense of their monolithic English identity, which they adhered to all the more ardently in the face of American Indian tribes. Yet this was also an identity that had been permanently altered and fragmented.

Through personal and public writing, which took the form of histories, autobiographies, and poems, Puritan and Pilgrim migrants to America tried to make sense of this tension between uncontested Englishness and the profound singularity of a religious mission that also made them distinct from their Old World brethren. The journey across the Atlantic was frequently interpreted as an allegory for the journey of their souls. Using the primitive, biblical church as the doctrinal standard, Puritans bore witness to history unfolding around them as an ongoing battle between their true church and the Antichrist who threatened to destroy the last remnants of the true faith.

In New England, they waged that battle from a new position of power. The struggle to establish a proper form of church and state—one that would support the right “ordinances” of faith—carried over from England, but whereas Puritans had once struggled as a group of minority dissenters, now they wielded political might as a majority able to enforce its will. Even so, they seldom could agree about what it was they actually willed—or what would truly constitute the proper form of church and state to nourish the faith of the faithful. Dissension and schism did not end when the Pilgrims and the Puritans left England. It was built into the system, and those in power had to wrestle with the extent of disagreement permitted and the range of practices allowed. For many ordinary Puritans, meanwhile, suffering moved from the bodily torture and persecution inflicted on radical Protestants in England to the suffering mind and faith of those who left home behind. The decision to migrate to the New World was a deeply ambivalent move, for it was a terrifying feeling to eschew your king because he did not represent your faith. Early American writers took on the challenge of trying to sort through this ambivalence, insisting that migration happened for a reason and that the journey was authored by God. Nonetheless, a structure of paranoia entered into and haunted the Protestant voice: once dissent begins, what prevents its unending continuance? Voices of the Atlantic journey to North America exude a sense of grandiosity as well as one of errant declension, wandering off into unknown parts.

Given these geographically and spiritually schismatic beginnings, it is perhaps ironic that American exceptionalism has been traced back to New England Puritanism. Particularly through the work of Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch, the New England Puritans once bore the weight of American origins, standing at the head of a tradition that would eventuate in the United States and its national literature. As the usual narrative has it, the Puritans saw themselves as a chosen people, establishing a new Promised Land that would serve as the opening of the millennium and the beginning of the end of time. Pursuing this “errand into the wilderness,” Puritans served as the origin point for a nation that would see itself as chosen by God, a “city on a hill” serving as a model of civil and religious liberty to all. Even today, many still trace Puritans forward from the language of New Israel through Manifest Destiny to the American century and the war on terror (see, e.g., Söderlind and Carson 2011 ). 1 As long as the Puritans were associated with the start of a unique American tradition, they were considered worth knowing and understanding.

For the past two decades a postexceptionalist wave of Puritan scholarship has effectively decoupled Puritanism from this larger telos of American origins. As a result, new historiographic tools have emerged for studying and understanding Puritanism in a variety of contexts. This special issue showcases the practices and literacies that make new and fundamental contributions to our understanding of the relation between narrative form and colonial history. Authors consider the radical transformation of Puritanism through missionary encounters, interactions with foreign landscapes, new peoples, and new religious communities. We understand these changes as simultaneously rooted in a particular time and place and part of a larger Atlantic world. The Puritans described in this special issue both advance Atlantic perspectives and resist them. As we shall see, new texts and textualities, new objects of analysis, new literacies, and new ways of reading become available when we attend to the real and fictive contexts of Puritanism.

The new Puritan studies takes shape against the backdrop of the old Puritan origins thesis, the roots of which date back long before twentieth-century scholarship. Already in the early 1800s John Quincy Adams linked the Mayflower Compact to the US Constitution and boldly proclaimed, “To the Puritans of New England this continent owes its Independence and its freedom” (quoted in Sheidley 1998 , 123). 2 That story took on new life in 1820, when the famed orator Daniel Webster ( 1821 , 6), while celebrating the bicentennial of the Pilgrim landing, explained that the history “of our native land” began at Plymouth, where a small band of Pilgrim settlers impressed on the shores “the first footsteps of civilized man.” Webster’s speech came at a time of rising tensions between North and South, including a struggle over who would write the nation’s history. As his words spread—printed and distributed in pamphlets, incorporated into textbooks, taught in schools, and memorized by pupils—the idea of Pilgrim and Puritan origins continued to rise. The battle for the beginning of America was waged throughout the nineteenth century, but it was largely won by New Englanders, whose story of America as originating in Plymouth and Boston was reflected in the dominant histories of the era.

Winning that battle in the nineteenth century entailed significant developments in the twentieth. Many years after Webster’s glorification of the Pilgrims, President Ronald Reagan ( 1974 ) would speak of a “divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage,” and he would ground that assertion in John Winthrop, the first Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Later, Reagan ( 1989 ) declared that Winthrop was “an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man.” He came “looking for a home that would be free” and thereby established America as a “shining city on a hill”—“a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.” Such a story has been taken up in varying degrees by politicians on both sides of the aisle. In 2006 , a rising senator named Barack Obama told graduating seniors of the University of Massachusetts at Boston that “the American experiment” began in the waters around them: “As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill,” he explained. “And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed.”

Yet it is not just politicians who have recited this narrative. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians also embraced it, giving this story the heft of scholarship and the authority of credentials. Historian George Bancroft ( 1834 , 338) declared that the “germ of our Institutions” lay in Puritan New England: “Through scenes of gloom and misery, the Pilgrims showed the way to an asylum for those, who would go to the wilderness for the purity of religion or the liberty of conscience” (349). In the twentieth century Perry Miller ( 1956 ) took up that story in a new way, rejecting romanticized versions of the Pilgrims and Puritans while still using them to establish the distinctive elements of a unique American culture, literature, and experience. Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1905] 2010 ) singled out the quintessential American Benjamin Franklin as the exemplar of the deep connection between Calvinism and capitalism. Then in the 1970s Sacvan Bercovitch (1975; 2011 ) turned to the Puritans to explain American political rhetoric from the seventeenth century to the present day. Puritan typology, he argued, mixed the sacred and the secular to sanctify America in a continuous arc of redemptive history. According to Bercovitch ( 1978 ; 2011 ) the unique qualities of Puritan typology so influenced American thinking that even today we cannot escape—and only inadequately resist—the exceptionalism built into their view. 3

Since the 1980s, however, this approach to studying Puritanism has been considered deeply problematic. Three basic issues with the “Puritan origins thesis” led Puritan studies beyond origins and exceptionalism to new questions, methods, and findings. First, many early Americanists pointed out that the study of New England Calvinists excluded a huge number of Americans from many different races, nations, and cultures. America, put simply, was always bigger and broader than a narrowly defined New England. And the solution to a Puritan-induced myopia was rather simple: stop studying Puritanism and start studying others. Early American literature and history enlarged rapidly, trying to take in the bewildering multitude of peoples, geographies, contacts, cultures, and literatures spread throughout North and South America. From their heyday in the 1960s through the 1980s, Puritan studies (and Puritan scholars) gradually diminished in the 1990s, even as early American history and literature expanded.

The second problem of the Puritan origins thesis was that it assumed a continuous narrative from the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution, from Puritan theology through Unitarianism to transcendentalism and beyond, from Election Day jeremiads in the 1660s to modern political speeches three hundred years later. Wanting to find a coherent story and a unique cultural identity, scholars from the early days of American studies up through Bercovitch imposed a teleological continuity on the past. The solution to this problem meant severing the story—shortening the narrative so that early American studies would not be used primarily to make sense of the American Revolution, the American renaissance, or American culture today. 4 Such a solution entailed a greater emphasis on comparative and connective studies across early America, integrating the Puritans of New England into a larger world without feeling the need to trace that world forward.

But beyond its neglect of so many American cultures and its problematic teleology, the Puritan origins thesis also contained a fundamental flaw: it actually got the Puritans wrong. The old thesis seemed to assume a homogeneous culture of Calvinism in early New England that gradually, and inevitably, secularized. When the twenty-first-century “religious turn” in literary studies prompted a resurgence of scholarly interest in the Puritans, the most significant change was the explosion of a unified and coherent New England Puritanism moving steadily from religious piety to secular prosperity. 5 Scholars looked instead, for example, to the presence and influence of Native American nations in New England, demonstrating how much the meeting of these cultures shaped one another in a multitude of ways. That contact presented new forms of knowledge in medical encounters (Wisecup 2013 ; Silva 2011 ), new theological questions and challenges (Bross 2004 ), new forms of communication and publication (Cohen 2009 ), new epistemological concerns and philosophical reflections about the soul (Rivett 2011 ; Van Engen 2015 ), new figures for transatlantic dialogues, debates, and power struggles (Stevens 2004 ), and much more. Even when scholars focused primarily on the white English settlers of New England, a great deal of diversity continued to emerge. Not only were there the usual prominent dissenters, like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, and the usual prominent dissenting groups, like Baptists and Quakers, but there were also plenty of seemingly “orthodox” Puritans who practiced little religious devotion, not willing to stake their lives either for or against the reigning religious establishment—especially when the establishment itself could not seem to unify around a single set of positions or beliefs. Ministers debated how to interpret scripture (Gordis 2003 ), while elite merchants pursued their own agendas against the established order (Breen 2001 ). Moreover, the diversity of practices and beliefs increased the farther one traveled from the center, so that the Puritans who ended up in Maine, for example, look far different from those in Boston (Chmielewski 2012 ).

In addition to the diversity of beliefs, New England Puritanism demonstrated a diversity of practices. The turn to “lived religion” in multiple fields opened up a Puritanism that was far more than a series of intellectual debates, assertions, and assents; instead, it was an exercise and a performance, a lived reality that included and expanded beyond a confessed set of doctrines (see Hall 1997 ). New England Calvinists engaged in numerous rites and rituals, a mix of moods, and a range of activities that could one day emphasize religious seriousness and the next day demonstrate very little devotion. Scholars realized that the only way to understand these multifarious moods and practices was to move past the printed sermons and treatises of ministers and magistrates. And so Puritan studies embraced new investigations of ritual practices and devotional manuals (Hambrick-Stowe 1982 ; Brown 2007 ); manuscripts, sermon culture, and the making of material texts (Hall 2008 ; Neuman 2013 ); and an expanding array of genres and conventions (Silva 2011 ), including new publics and new sites of publication that changed the meaning of individual texts and events (Field 2009 ). Hutchinson and the antinomian controversy, in particular, became no longer a local conflict about American Puritanism but a signal occurrence of transatlantic puritanism understood only through the pressures of an English audience (Bozeman 2004 ; Como 2004 ; Dillon 2001 ; Ditmore 2000 ). From David Hall’s Worlds of Wonder ( 1989 ) to Janice Knight’s Orthodoxies in Massachusetts ( 1994 ) to numerous others today, the Puritans of “Puritan New England” have seemed to dissolve before us, no longer a coherent group defined around a codified set of propositions and beliefs but an aggregate of individuals with varying orthodoxies and differing levels of devotion, constantly shifting their practices and their writings through new contacts and relations.

As this increasing diversity has surfaced, we have not entirely abandoned the idea of a broader Puritan culture: a diverse set of individuals within a wide movement can still retain some unifying principles or expressions. 6 But even here the Puritan origins thesis and its tie to American exceptionalism have often gotten those unifying principles and expressions wrong. The work of correction coincides with the 1980s critique of exceptionalism, when Theodore Dwight Bozeman ( 1986 ) and Andrew Delbanco ( 1984 ) challenged the idea that Puritans pursued a grand “errand into the wilderness.” As their essays and books revealed, the evidence for such an errand—at least in the first generation of Puritan settlers—was rather scant, and what evidence did surface seemed either taken out of context or imposed from later eras. As Virginia Anderson ( 1991 ) and David Cressy ( 1987 ) added, the process of migration involved multiple motives, with religious ideology forming only one of them, and it would take later writers and descendants to mythologize the first Puritan settlers as driven by a core, articulate purpose. Instead, early English settlers more closely resembled bewildered immigrants, not so much pursuing a global mission as escaping the ravages of Europe and attempting to find some kind of refuge in New England, hoping to live godly lives but not seeing themselves as the pinnacle of the Reformation or the forerunners of the millennium. 7 Recently, Kathleen Donegan ( 2014 ) has taken that approach one step further, showing that the Pilgrims of Plymouth, like other early colonists in Roanoke and Jamestown and the West Indies, were epistemically disoriented and tormented in the welter of suffering they both inflicted and experienced. Lost and confused, these colonists were hardly able to maintain a coherent English identity, let alone pursue a glorious civil or religious enterprise.

Far from a unique origin isolated and set apart, New England’s historical, political, cultural, and literary development increasingly made intellectual sense only within a transatlantic, and then a wider Atlantic, and then a global interconnected frame. Thus, Baird Tipson’s ( 2015 ) careful study of Puritan theology and practice in New England, focused on Thomas Hooker in Hartford, understands its subject only by bringing to bear much broader theological currents and debates spanning all of contemporary Europe. Similarly, Nan Goodman ( 2018 ) has sought to demonstrate the cosmopolitan thinking and feeling ingrained in Puritan culture, while Jan Stievermann’s ( 2016 ) work on Cotton Mather thoroughly debunks the idea that he was a parochial theologian invested in American exceptionalism. As such studies reveal, scholars now regularly link the cultural contact and diversity within New England to the transatlantic publics and dialogues in which accounts of such encounters and experiences came into print. In Puritan studies today, the early English settlers of New England can no longer be approached without considering an international context of religion, empire, trade, and war. 8

In taking this approach, scholars of Puritanism today regularly align themselves with interests and methodologies that define early American studies more broadly. For example, a turn to the history of science has produced new works on the role of alchemical and empirical methods in early New England, demonstrating the tight bond between science and religion in the search for a unified system of knowledge (Woodward 2013 ), in the patterns of medical narratives (Silva 2011 ), and in the study of the invisible world (Rivett 2011 ). Meanwhile, as new histories of American capitalism have burgeoned, the Puritans have been revisited to understand how Calvinist merchants and ministers integrated and adapted emerging ideas of trade, sometimes resisting economic systems and sometimes spurring them on, shifting and struggling with doctrine without losing their devotion (Valeri 2010 ). The rise of the history of emotions, another growing subfield, has led to new work attempting to understand Calvinism’s language of sentiment (Burnham 1997 ) and its theology of sympathy (Van Engen 2015 ) in relation to later developments in moral sense philosophy and sentimental literature. Political history, long sidelined, has also returned. New works have attempted to understand the Puritans’ role in developing ideas of republicanism through attempts to articulate a proper order of church governance (Winship 2012 ), while also looking at the way Puritans feared and resisted “arbitrary rule” and tried to establish a local form of English liberty reliant on “equity” (Hall 2011 ). 9 Finally, in the “turn to religion” and the development of postsecular scholarship—which has affected all these works—new studies of Puritanism have attempted to demonstrate how the “religious” and the “secular” shaped one another in New England, including how the Puritans embedded a sense of “secularity” at the heart of their enterprise (Traister 2016 ). This new account of the sacred and the secular does not turn on typology or Bercovitch’s sanctifying of America but rather relies on scholars such as Talal Asad ( 2003 ), Tracy Fessenden ( 2007 ), Saba Mahmood ( 2016 ), and Charles Taylor ( 2007 ) to reconsider the practices of daily life and the changing conditions of belief—the ways in which doctrine and ritual could shift, adapt, and incorporate new developments without being any less devotional.

In addition to the way Puritan scholars have aligned their work with broader interests in science, economics, emotions, and religion, they have also taken up the study of how early American history and literature have been remembered and deployed by later generations. Again, this interest extends far beyond Puritan New England. The booming study of how archives have been formed and how they function—the politics of preservation and the power of memory—represents one prominent example of this wider interest in collective and cultural memories. In studying Puritan memory in particular, scholars have sought to understand the continual reimaginings of American Puritanism that range from celebration to castigation—from Thanksgiving to Salem—encapsulated in everything from tabletop knickknacks to novels to television to tourism. Studies in the formation of collective memory and the making of Puritan texts (when did certain writings become famous, who made them famous, and why) have begun to look closely at how the Puritans came to have so much import in American history, literature, and politics. 10 How did Alexis de Tocqueville come to trace American democracy back to Puritan New England in the 1830s? Why in the early 1900s did Weber, while traveling across the United States, come to associate American capitalism with American Calvinism? In short, how were the Puritans turned into an American origin story, and what purpose has that origin served for specific people at different times and in particular contexts? These and other questions animate many scholars who do the work of resisting and overcoming a teleological narrative of exceptionalism by seeking to understand how, when, and why it ever took shape in the first place.

This special issue presents five articles showcasing these elements of new work on the Puritans. In varying ways, each author reflects on issues of temporality, reimagining histories as well as historiographies of Puritanism in order to reconceive of the Puritan origins thesis (“Infidel America”), get beyond historicism altogether (“Disgusting Affects”), and imagine future eschatologies (“Islam, Puritanism, and Secular Time”).

Rachel Trocchio’s “Memory’s Ends” begins the journal issue by directly addressing the function and purpose of memory, as understood by the Puritans. Her argument is that for the Puritans memory was more than storage; it was also a hermeneutic practice. Memory brought together creativity, invention (in a classical sense), and grace; it took what had been stored and interpreted it in modes meant to touch the heart and change the person. This essay opens up a conversation about how the Puritans understood memory before subsequent authors consider how the Puritans end up being remembered.

Daniel Grace begins the process in “Infidel America,” where he uses the writings of Frederick Douglass to reverse the dynamics of the jeremiad as it was narrated by Bercovitch and others. Grace shows that for Douglass the jeremiad makes the case that America must be redeemed by England from an original sin brought by the Puritans. This is an America that cannot be saved through introspection but rather must be saved from without.

In “How to Undo the History of Sexuality,” Jordan Alexander Stein offers us a different look at how the material practice of editing Puritan writings helped embed a certain kind of understanding about them, in a way that entails broader ramifications for understanding the assumptions and effects of editorial labors. Moving past origins stories and beyond linear historicism, Molly Farrell’s “Disgusting Affects” offers a transhistorical approach to studying literary modes and methods of affect, while tracing the uses and effects of the specific affect of “disgust.”

Finally, Christopher Trigg’s “Islam, Puritanism, and Secular Time” is future oriented. Trigg asks us to imagine what a postexceptionalist eschatology might look like. Focusing explicitly on issues of temporality, this essay explores how an understood future time affects issues of religious pluralism and tolerance in the present.

The essays in this special issue, along with all the many studies helping to reshape our understanding of Puritanism today, share a common desire to explain and understand American Puritanism through a few seeming paradoxes. Scholars today see Puritanism emerging only from its interactions with a multitude of others spread across early America and the wider Atlantic, and yet it emerges precisely because it contains within it certain distinctions—often to the surprise and consternation of its early modern contemporaries. Puritans partook in the enterprises of the Atlantic world and English imperialism while also understanding and applying science, economics, emotions, philosophy, politics, gender, race, and religion in their own ways. The study of Puritanism today, therefore, is either explicitly or implicitly interconnected and comparative. From that claim a second seeming paradox arises: scholars studying the Puritans today see their subjects as tension filled, impossible to define, and diverse beyond any clear or concise coherence, so that any claims made about “Puritanism” writ large must constantly be qualified to indicate a certain set of particular individuals within a broader religious culture. Finally, insofar as distinctions do indicate some unifying principles or expressions within a broader religious culture, those distinctions do not become marks of superiority or origin points in a tale of national development but rather are sites to understand from one particular angle the broader topics motivating a specific study of Puritanism—the issues that link scholars of Puritanism to other scholars working far afield—so that we always approach the varied cultural landscape of New England through the lens of a vast early America.

On older books that trace out this pattern, see, for example, Cherry 1998 and Tuveson 1968 .

In one of his earliest public speeches, John Quincy Adams ( 2002 ) declared that the Mayflower Compact is “the only instance in human history of that positive, original social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government.”

For a helpful recent reassessment of where Bercovitch’s ideas stand in contemporary scholarship, see Early American Literature 2012 .

This teleological assumption is precisely what David Shields ( 1993 , 542) opposed more broadly in early American studies, when he took joy in the new approach “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 Crevecoeur to Barlow and Brown.” As Sarah Rivett ( 2012 , 393) summarizes, “Early American studies has moved away from grand narratives of national development, separated the colonial past from the nation that has long claimed its heritage, and defined a colonial culture that is much more than just a foreshadowing of things to come.”

This formulation became popular around 2005, when literary scholars began to reflect on the visibility of religion in literary studies (see, e.g., Holsinger 2006 ).

Scholars of Puritanism in the United States are split about whether to retain a capital P to mark off a distinct culture, but studies of puritanism in England no longer capitalize the term because the assumption is that “puritanism” is so diverse and so difficult to define that any use of the term—especially with a capital P —misleadingly implies more coherence than can actually be found.

On this point, see also Conforti 2006 . For the desire to live and model godly lives—not in exceptionalist terms but as a basic striving of their Christian ethos shared with other Protestant communities in England and elsewhere—see Bremer 1992 .

For the turn to transatlantic Puritanism, see Foster 1991 and Bremer 1993 . For one important treatment of Puritan New England within a broader English Atlantic world, see Pestana 2004 . For global economic networks and their impact on Puritan New England, see Burnham 2007 . For one of the best and broadest comparative accounts of early colonial empires, see Elliott 2006 . For essay collections that set Puritan New England within these broader contexts, see Gregerson and Juster 2013 and Kirk and Rivett 2014 .

For an excellent review of Winship 2012 and Hall 2011 that also offers a recent account of Puritan studies as it stands now, see Peterson 2013 . For another good account of Puritan studies today, see Traister 2017b .

Studies of Nathaniel Hawthorne have always been interested in this question, but it has expanded much more broadly in recent years. Seelye’s ( 1998 ) massive volume led the way in this expansion. For other examples, see Conforti 2001 , Gamble 2012 , Gradert 2017 , Leise 2017 , Roylance 2018 , and Van Engen 2013 . Essays about the cultural use and memorialization of Puritanism also appear in Traister 2017a .

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New Puritans

Eileen Razzari Elrod, Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Santa Clara University, is the author of Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography (2008).

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Eileen Razzari Elrod, New Puritans, American Literary History , Volume 30, Issue 1, Spring 2018, Pages 134–144, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajx037

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You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Inigo Montoya , The Princess Bride

The Puritan problem—in the study of US history and literature—is nearly as old, nearly as familiar, as the Puritans themselves. From their first representations, writers argued about who New England Puritans actually were (with questions posed largely in terms of degrees of badness: very? mostly? complicatedly?) and how and to what extent those (bad) old Puritans mattered. The “to what extent” question was easy: a lot. For generations of scholars (Perry Miller, Edmund Morgan, Sacvan Bercovitch), New England—defined almost entirely by Puritanism—loomed large enough to preempt more expansive views of early America.

The consequences of that preoccupation have been acknowledged in the scholarly terrain of American literature for several decades. Even as the Puritans held sway in imaginations and syllabi, we were explaining to each other (and asking our students to explain back to us) why allowing the Puritans to retain a central position in our understanding of early American history and literature was a problem. Not first, not only, not most important, and yet they dominated scholarly conversations and seemed inescapable, providing a foundation for persistent national myths, notably American exceptionalism. Emphasized, simplified, and vilified on the way to all manner of arguments and assertions (often sweeping), Puritan identity seemed obvious enough. It manifested itself in violent judgment (Quakers, Salem), suppression of women (Anne Hutchinson), and a core commitment to an inscrutable God of judgment who relished torturing those who were headed by divine decree to hell (unforgettably emblematized by Jonathan Edwards’s image of God dangling the unconverted over the fiery pit of hell “as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect”). But the popular appeal of America’s original frenemies is as relentless as our rejection of them. Their—and our—binary sensibility (we love to hate them) is surely part of their enduring appeal. Characterizations consisting of opposing and familiarly Puritan dichotomies—hell or heaven, damned or saved, evil or good—reinforce contemporary literary critical, aesthetic, and perhaps even ethical dichotomies—uncomplicated or ambiguous, easily determined or worth analysis, contemptible or respectable.

Furthermore, since the 1990s, the crucial questions that dominated the field have required rethinking along the lines of expansion: canon, and race and gender, then economics and geography—transatlanticism, globalism. Puritanism as a site seemed to represent contraction or fixity. Questions of religion, sidelined by a historical discomfort with the category as a site of inquiry, emerged more slowly. During the last decade, the dynamic has been much discussed as part of a turn to religion in literary studies, notably in the 2010 special issue of Early American Literature and then again in the 2013 issue of PMLA , where Sarah Rivett’s and Joanna Brooks’s discussions, for example, offered incisive accounts of the presence of religion as a category for inquiry in early American studies.

Having long since abandoned the persistently compelling but wholly problematic tradition of Puritan “influence,” which, though Puritan-centric, did not substantively address Puritan religion, new Puritan studies employ more inclusive and interdisciplinary approaches that take religion seriously as part of a network of intersectional categories of inquiry. Recent work broadens and complicates the idea of Puritanism, extending the boundaries of geography, culture, and race. Heather Kopelson’s Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (2014), for example, presents religion as an embodied experience emphatically marked by race, with a literally expanded territory for Puritan sites of experience that include the West Indies. Kopelson’s methodology—as unfamiliar as the ground she investigates—invites reconsideration of how to look as well as what to look at, particularly as the view shifts from the text-heavy record in Massachusetts to the lived experience of Puritan believers across lines of race, culture, and geography. Wendy Warren’s extraordinary New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (2016) examines a crucial, mostly unacknowledged aspect of New England Puritan experience, reminding us that even as Puritans struggled to live out their theology and wrestled with now well-worn crises of authority and identity, they participated in a global economy, profiting from and justifying or maintaining silence on slavery.

[W]hat’s new in Puritan studies includes not only new territory, but also deeper, different investigations into foundational figures, events, and texts—the very stuff that fueled those caricatures that scholars and popular readers love to hate.

Rethinking the Puritans—including their experience of religion—is one of the focal points of these books—two scholarly monographs with a clear focus on mostly familiar events and texts in seventeenth-century New England Puritanism, and an edited collection of the writings of Jonathan Edwards, sometimes regarded as the eighteenth-century big finish to New England Puritanism as it morphs into later versions of itself. The representation of Puritan religion—both theology and practice—in these studies seems deliberately appreciative and (perhaps because of that appreciative stance) new, offering a way to set aside facile portraits that enable students and scholars to dismiss key figures (like Edwards or John Winthrop). It’s harder to come by readings that oversimplify, say, Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet, or Mary Rowlandson, as difficulty, gender, and the intensely personal voices of each foreground contradiction and conflict, making them more accessible for literary scholarship and teaching. But the ministerial, authoritative figures, less accessible to contemporary readers, are more typically the sources of the fictional versions that became imprints in Nathaniel Hawthorne et al. and inflected those generalizations about intolerance and rigidity.

Gerald McDermott and Ronald Story’s edited volume, The Other Jonathan Edwards: Selected Writings on Society, Love , and Justice (2015), challenges the familiar portrait of Edwards as a preacher of hellfire and damnation. The collection includes 13 sermons (all considerably less familiar to readers than “Sinners”); an excerpt from A History of the Work of Redemption ; a letter to Speaker Thomas Hubbard on “Caring for Indians”; two selections from Edwards’s Miscellanies Notebook; three entries from Images of Divine Things ; “A Church Covenant”; excerpts from Treatise concerning Religious Affections , and an excerpt from The Nature of True Virtue . In contrast to most of the selections in this thin volume, Religious Affections —an examination of the role of emotion in religious experience in the context of the revivalism of the first Great Awakening—is one of Edwards’s most frequently anthologized works.

Edwards came to be identified almost entirely by his most familiar work, a fact that drives the rationale for this edition, which, while not fully articulated, is summed up in the title. McDermott and Story’s Edwards will be familiar to Puritan studies scholars, but he may surprise readers a bit farther afield. Outside of Edwards specialists (who inhabit theology programs as well as history, literature, or religious studies departments—diverse locations that point out an important dynamic concerning the audience for Edwards scholarship), readers both scholarly and popular often reinforce an easy caricature of Edwards. “Sinners,” the work most closely, even exclusively, associated with Edwards, conjures an ominous, unforgettable figure. Rather than that minister of doom and judgment (and fabulously literary metaphors, surely a part of why the caricature based on “Sinners” became and remains compelling), readers of this slim edition of the “other” Edwards encounter a socially engaged and compassionate pastor, preoccupied with questions of ethics and social responsibility, persistent concerns for the poor in and around Northampton, and the way Christians have failed to do right by Indigenous neighbors. This Edwards’s judgment concerns not so much election or damnation, but rather virtue—specifically, charity, kindness, and generosity—to which he repeatedly calls his congregation. McDermott and Story reposition Edwards’s theological commitment to divine punishment by emphasizing, instead, his compassionate engagement with others. Christians, says Edwards, are required to do justice. And in these selections that means generously giving to the poor, exercising compassion, and helping others in material ways. Not meeting those basic requirements of Christian religion has negative human effects—on society as well as on one’s soul, this Edwards argues. Love, kindness, and charity are duties to God, basic responses to God’s love, and essential requirements for the functioning of society—that last purpose, a recurring concern in this volume.

This “other” Edwards is preoccupied with heaven and love rather than such Puritan standbys of hell and damnation. In one of the most memorable selections, a 1738 sermon entitled “Heaven Is a World of Love,” Edwards argues that love is the fundamental quality of God and heaven, and, therefore, must be at the heart of (godly) human experience. Heaven, Edwards explains in this sermon, is simply love perfected, and God is love, essential: “The heart of God is the original seat or subject of [love]” and “Love is in God as light is in the sun” (84, 85). Edwards describes God’s love, God’s nature, as “a mutual holy energy” within the deity, “whereby the Deity becomes nothing but an infinite and unchangeable act of love” (85). Consequently, God’s people must act “like the inhabitants of heaven,” as if they understand the essential feature of that heaven to which they are bound: “By living a life of love, you will be in the way to heaven. As heaven is a world of love, so the way to heaven is the way of love” (89). The love that determines heaven and defines God in this sermon recurs throughout the collection in Edwards’s command to his congregants to exercise kindness and justice in their relationships with others.

In “The Duty of Charity to the Poor” (1733), Edwards focuses on human responsibility, on the community taking care of its own, as he insists that true compassionate action results in material support for the impoverished, and that the fundamental moral requirement is unavoidable for those who claim to love God. Edwards anticipates and dispenses with the objections he imagines from his congregation: that they do not know enough about the situation of the poor, that the poor may not be truly poor, that they may be dishonest or undeserving in various ways. None of that matters, Edwards tells his congregation. Godliness and authentic love of neighbor requires charity on behalf of the poor. Scriptural commands on this topic are clear: “the Bible is full of ’em,” says Edwards, inviting his biblically informed audience to bring them to mind for themselves (58). His call for kindness and social engagement with those in need—including relieving material hardship— extends beyond the Puritan community. In “Letter to Speaker Thomas Hubbard” (1751), Edwards describes his concern for the Native Americans with whom he worked during the final phase of his career. Elsewhere in the collection he preaches against greed and self-interest (“Envious Men” [1730]) and urges his congregation to overcome disagreements with kindness and love (“Living Peaceably with One Another” [1723]).

Love, neighborliness, and generosity rather than stern judgment and rigid prohibitions—who was this Edwards? In his own (other) words, Edwards undercuts his familiar, and consequently heartening, stereotype to the point of straining recognition. What, after all, are we to do with the searing imagery of “Sinners,” when we encounter an Edwards who advocates love of neighbor above all else and insists that God is essentially love? This Edwards embodies not what we love to hate, but what we actually love: contradiction, complexity. And he requires further inquiry.

While McDermott and Story introduce a new Edwards by shifting the frame from the overrepresented to the less familiar sermons of the most famous American preacher, Van Engen presents a similar reintroduction—not to an individual Puritan standard-bearer, but to the Puritans as a community. Reading Van Engen, one might imagine, despite the impossible chronology, that these “sympathetic” Puritans had heard and taken to heart the sermons included in The Other Jonathan Edwards . Both works (regardless of the generations of Puritans separating Van Engen’s and McDermott and Story’s subjects) concern not a historical or theological shift, but, rather, a more accurate (and, certainly, appreciative) study. The exhortations of the compassionate, community-minded, “other” Edwards resonate in Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (2015), where Van Engen identifies sympathy, kindness, and emotion as controlling principles in Puritan theology and practice, and argues that a distinctively affective community sensibility held Puritanism together. Despite familiar appearances and evidence to the contrary, Puritan identity, says Van Engen, was founded on love, a rich, complex “fellow feeling” that led to togetherness and mutual regard, informing robust commitments that both bound them together and set them apart from others.

Acknowledging that feeling has long been the provenance of scholars of American Puritanism, Van Engen provides an overview of the scholarly work that engages emotion in Puritan studies since the 1990s, noting, however, that “in this regard, scholars of the Puritans remain a rather lonely crowd,” as he continues, along with McDermott and Story, perhaps, to lament the inaccurate portrait of Calvinism which accentuates “unfeeling austerity and tyrannical judgment” (7). Frequently taken up by popular writers, such a view becomes normative even, to a certain extent, among scholars outside of Puritan specialists—but clearly within American studies—where the problem of Puritan caricature and dismissal gets perpetuated with varying degrees of vigor. In early American studies, as Van Engen notes, one often finds instances of broad-brush portrayals of New England Puritans that leave entirely intact the endlessly appealing but inaccurate generalizations.

This is not, however, simply an argument against familiar Puritan portraits imagined by writers such as Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, H. L. Mencken, and Robert Penn Warren (with whom Van Engen begins his study) and presumed by some scholars. Rather, Sympathetic Puritans thoroughly recalibrates writers and moments well known to scholars of early America, an effort requiring reconsideration of texts both familiar and new. Beginning with unsympathetic Puritans (in a conversation similar to the one McDermott and Story participate in), Van Engen aims to redraw the portrait of the stern Puritans by chronicling references to their commitments to each other and to the notion of community and fellow feeling. At the same time, he also wants to connect that portrait to the feeling and action of sentiment and sympathy which characterize the early novel.

Drawing on writers such as Winthrop, Thomas Shepard, John Eliot, and Rowlandson, and on the rich textual world experienced by the emphatically text-centered Puritans, Van Engen’s study of Puritan sympathy underscores the complexity of this central idea. Examining the origins of Puritan sympathy, he identifies connections to the Stoics, Quintilian, Erasmus, John Calvin, Puritan theology, the Bible, and more. This extensive conceptual map of sources and influences elucidates Puritan affection for and identification with others, including an insistence on the goodness, usefulness, and value of feelings—in theology, preaching, and mission activity. Furthermore, the emphasis on feelings and relationships provided a site for judgment within Puritan communities, which so effectively both drew themselves together and separated themselves from others.

On the foundation of this idea of sympathy and its importance to the Puritans, Van Engen examines mostly iconic episodes and texts that arguably constitute Puritanism: Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy, Rowlandson, Eliot and his mission among Native Americans, and Salem. He also considers how sympathy functions as a defining feature of the American Puritans as they remain affiliated with and separate from Puritan communities across the Atlantic.

Van Engen’s focus on sympathy as the core Puritan belief and practice makes Puritans, like McDermott and Story’s Jonathan Edwards, not just more palatable but quite differently understood. Van Engen deftly reframes the infamous Puritan judgment, typically the presumed extension of a cruel God of judgment. Call to mind, because it’s so easy, Edwards’s most famous and, as McDermott and Story point out, nonetheless unrepresentative sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” featuring God dangling the unconverted sinner—like a spider or “loathsome insect”—over the flaming pit of hell. Puritan judgment fueled similarly cruel and violent aggression toward non-Puritan others, resulting in the orderly execution of Quakers and witches and the disorderly killing of Native Americans, to name obvious examples. But what if Puritan aggression toward outsiders was neither so much (as in the case of the reframed Edwards) unrepresentative, nor contextualized by similar hostilities originating in communities unmarked by the fierce, finely articulated theocratic sensibilities of the Puritans, but, instead, the opposite edge of a foundational commitment to sympathy?

Not only an emotion (though that’s important, and Puritan tears, for example, figure prominently in this study) but also a theological principle at the core of identity and practice, Puritan sympathy conveyed risks as well as rewards. Improperly applied sympathy was dangerous, hence the insularity and mistrust of the other, a defining feature of “Puritanism.” Exile (as in Hutchinson’s case) was required for the sake of community. Wrongly directed sympathy looked like succumbing to seduction. Properly understood Puritan brotherly love was reserved for the brethren. Van Engen sees this dynamic operating throughout the Antinomian Controversy, to which he devotes two chapters and brings new insight. When Winthrop, for example, publicly rejects Hutchinson’s brother-in-law John Wheelwright on the basis of his antinomian leanings, members of the Boston Church take offense at Winthrop’s lack of sympathy, charging that he had spoken unkindly about Wheelwright and had perhaps misrepresented Wheelwright’s position. Winthrop defends himself by acknowledging the rightness of their argument as he insists that love motivated his actions; he did love Wheelwright, after all, and he had first taken care to speak privately with him. Love, Winthrop says, compelled him to condemn Wheelwright. “Brotherly love” and “family feud” feature throughout Van Engen’s discussion of the Antinomian Controversy.

Puritan fellow feeling is related in substantive ways to persuasion, and Van Engen traces this action of feeling through sermons, missionary activity, the conversion process, the captivity narrative, and finally the novel. The connection between the language of Puritan sympathy and sentimentalism is particularly evident in Puritan missionary activity with Native Americans. The Eliot tracts document sympathy at the center of Puritan inclinations and methodology with Native Americans. And Rowlandson’s complex affective response to her captivity takes on additional nuance when read through a lens of Puritan sympathy. In her most distressed moments when she sees herself as most separate from and least sympathetic toward her captors, Rowlandson’s response can still be glossed via sympathy, or resistance to sympathy. Even the crucial experience of conversion is best understood through this central idea. Puritan fellow feeling marked both the process and proof of authentic religion. As Van Engen describes it: “feeling, knowledge, [and] practice” came together in both the action and evidence of conversion (152).

Sympathy is the winsome center that holds this new Puritanism together, the prevailing feature posited to replace rigid authoritarianism, which by the end of this study becomes an unfortunate side effect along the way to community sensibility and feeling. Van Engen’s gracefully written study, both original and informed, is a pleasure and a provocation. His reframing of some of early America’s most studied moments requires that readers press a kind of reset button on familiar, even iconic, texts and moments. Puritan sympathy invites a reconsideration of the essential meaning and influence of Puritan sensibility—not on “America” or the “American self,” but on reader and genre, particularly as a precursor to the novel.

Interest in questions of influence and a fairly linear view of literary history mark Bryce Traister’s Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism (2016), which is part of Ohio State’s Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies series edited by Lori Branch. Arguing that contemporary secularism originates from the center of New England Puritanism, Traister draws on key moments and writers to demonstrate how women’s spirituality, sometimes imagined as either peripheral to or prohibited by Puritanism, is instead central. Dismissals of Puritanism typically rely on a view of it as absolutely theocratic and patriarchal, characterizations consistent with the version of Puritanism that McDermott and Story and Van Engen resist. Indeed, Traister shares with them a sense that Puritanism is more nuanced, a more habitable idea than has been assumed. Traister argues that the distancing and dismissal of this version of Puritanism leads us to overlook or misunderstand its influence. Binary views of religion and gender have shaped contemporary views of the secular, with the consequence of producing persistently skewed results. Rejecting a misrepresentation of a religion of the past has contemporary consequences, which Traister sees, for example, in current dismissals based on simplistic views of politically conservative religion and politically liberal secularism.

Women’s spirituality is the means through which Puritanism becomes a crucial influence in US culture. Like the other writers here, Traister presents a markedly alternative portrayal of New England Puritanism, distinguishing it from the commonplace view that underscores the obvious patriarchalism at its core. Suggesting that such readings preclude an understanding of the role of women’s experiences, women’s voices, Traister contends that gendered analyses of women’s religious experience shaped early American Puritanism as well as its historical reception, including secular perspectives, which regularly dismiss religious experience. Secularism arises from Puritanism, specifically enabled by self-consciously understood female experience within Puritanism: “American intellectual authority has long figured America in relation to problematical femininity” (125).

In Traister’s view, religious women are neither marginal nor aberrational in New England Puritanism. Rather, Hutchinson, Rowlandson, and the women of the Salem witch trials “anchor” Puritan piety even as they create a fundamentally anti-institutionalist religious strain. Traister identifies this extremist spirituality not generically with Puritanism as it distinguished itself from tamer versions of Protestantism, but specifically with women’s piety and experience within Puritanism. Female piety and resistance to religious authority is the defining characteristic of American Puritanism—both foundation and threat.

Tracing the evolution of female piety and resistance in Puritanism as it resonates in the post-Puritan past and present in the US, Traister argues that Hutchinson’s antinomianism—when she claims the authority of personal revelation in opposition to ecclesial authority—leads to a more vigorous and violent rejection of both strains in the Puritan exchange with the Quakers. Traister sees in the Puritan controversy with the Quakers, specifically in condemnations of brutality against Quakers, the emergence of a discourse of human rights and a religious understanding of the public sphere. Hutchinson’s piety links her to the Quakers and to Rowlandson. Like Hutchinson, like the New England Quakers, Rowlandson’s experience and articulation of struggle evokes the rise of the secular. In Rowlandson’s thoroughly conflicted and intimate descriptions of her experience of suffering and piety, Traister glimpses a nascent version of the psychology of the individual.

In this study, another reframing that renders American Puritans both more appealing and more complex, Traister signals new ways of understanding polarities in American religion and politics. There are moments when Traister’s interest in understanding the beginnings of secularism leads to a distracting linearity with too much weight on the connections between subtle readings of seventeenth-century New England and deeply fraught contemporary conversations about politics and religion. To the extent that Traister sees the complexities of seventeenth-century Christianity, we might also consider a nuanced view of contemporary Christianity, which remains contradictory and difficult. An identification of Christianity with the political right, for example, and secularism with the left, leaves out the piety and experience of Americans who disrupt those categories; secular conservatives and pious liberals—both camps driven to social and political positions from unfaith/faith perspectives—as surely as Hutchinson and Winthrop were. US politics features plenty of liberals and progressive activists who came to their thinking precisely because of their commitment to secularism and religious faith—even within Christianity—not (only) “in spite of it,” as Traister suggests (203). The mainstream Protestant social gospel; left-wing evangelicalism; and Catholic and Jesuit ethics of compassion, engagement, and solidarity with the marginalized are but a few cases in point—each one calling out alternative strains of historical US Christianity, each one sharing with the Puritans a complex set of beliefs that includes apparent contradictions.

New Puritanism represented by these studies invites readers to rethink dismissals of Puritan “influence,” but on entirely shifted grounds within the parameters of traditional Puritan texts and moments; Traister reconsiders gender, piety, and Puritanism as key dynamics in understanding the secular. Both Van Engen and Traister examine texts that constitute the experiences of New England Puritanism as we have come to understand it—the Antinomian Controversy, violence against the Quakers, Rowlandson, and Salem—as well as the historiography of each event, and call on readers to reconsider the meaning and influence of familiar figures and crises. And all three of these works invite readers to come to terms with decades-long discomfort with and misrepresentation of Puritan discourse, experience, and influence. Taken together, they reimagine the Puritans, recasting the idea of influence and mapping an appreciative and consequently challenging inquiry into Puritan religious identity and experience. New Puritan studies means new materials, new boundaries, new territory. It also means rethinking familiar moments and texts because Puritanism might not mean what we think it means. Informed and expansive new readings invite us to consider what Puritanism means now—in thoroughly reimagined contexts that include the Atlantic world, a global economy, embodied religion, the lived experience of Puritans and their religion in the context of social and economic history, and our contemporary moment.

Brooks Joanna. “Soul Matters.” PMLA , vol. 128 , no. 4 , Oct. 2013 , pp. 947 – 52 .

Google Scholar

Kopelson Heather Miyano. Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic . New York UP , 2014 .

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McDermott Gerald , Story Ronald , editors. The Other Jonathan Edwards: Selected Writings on Society, Love, and Justice. U of Massachusetts P , 2015 .

Rivett Sarah. “Early American Religion in a Postsecular Age.” PMLA , vol. 128 , no. 4 , Oct. 2013 , pp. 989 – 96 .

Traister Bryce. Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism. Ohio State UP , 2016 .

Van Engen Abram. Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England. Oxford UP , 2015 .

Warren Wendy. New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. Norton , 2016 .

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6.1: Introduction to Early American and Puritan Literature

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If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us. –Helen Dunmore, British Poet

Learning Outcomes

• Describe the major historical and cultural developments of colonial America; explain key concepts
• Describe the major conventions, tropes, and themes of Puritan and early American literature; identify and discuss those features with regard to individual works
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Puritanism in American Literature - Essay Example

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Extract of sample "Puritanism in American Literature"

It can be noted that Puritan literature focused on achieving its duties to become a "city in a hill" by living a life of moral excellence for the entire world to see. Their works are devoid of self-righteousness and glorification but praise and glory are always given to God. Amidst the persevering life of a saint, the works also talk of God's providence and grace. In A Model of Christian Charity, Winthrop asks why some people are rich while others are poor. What reasons does he provide for this inequality and what do his responses reveal about Puritan ideology In A Model of Christian Charity, Winthrop states three reasons why people are not equals, some are rich while other are poor: "to hold conformity with the rest of His works," that He might have the more occasion to manifest the work of His spirit," and "that every man might have need of each other" (Reuben).

It should be noted that his reasoning largely mirrors the basic teachings and doctrine of Puritanism. First, it shows the Puritan's belief of predestination, that is, some are predestined to be rich while others are predestined to be poor. Second, that God is a superior and whose creation is perfect. Being poor is not seen as God's failure, but God's way of perfecting the world. Thus, poverty is not a problem of mankind but that it exists in order to manifest justice, respect, and mercy. In his response, Winthrop communicates the Puritan's deep reverence and faith in God.

To what extent is Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband" an expression of individual feeling, and where does it echo the Puritan ideology of marriage, including married love as the "duty" of every god-fearing coupleAnne Bradstreet's poem for his husband entitled "To My Dear and Loving Husband" seems to overflow with the love she has for her husband. This is amidst the absence of her husband who was always busy with his task as a colony administrator. The first seven lines of the poem state her passionate love for her husband.

Her individual feeling is highlighted as she says "I prize thy love more than the whole Mines of gold or all the riches of that the East doth hold. My love is such that river cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense." These lines show her passion and devotion to her husband, claiming that her love is not something that she gives out of duty or responsibility. Her love for her husband is her treasure that is unmatched by material wealth and it is only her husband's love which can make her whole.

However, the eight to twelfth lines somehow echo married love as a duty. "The heavens reward thee manifold I pray" indicates that loving your wife or husband is a duty which, when well performed, is rewarded by God.

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American Literature, 1607-1865: Puritans

• Discovery of the Americas
• Revolutionary Writers
• Native Americans & Enslaved Americans
• Transcendalists & Abolitionists
• Romanticism

Puritan Writings

• William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation William Bradford: from "History of Plymouth Plantation, c. 1650
• John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (1630)
• A Key Into the Language of America by Roger Williams
• The Author to Her Book by Anne Bradstreet, Poetry Foundation
• To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet, Poetry Foundation
• Verses Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666 by Anne Bradstreet, Poetry Foundation
• A Narrative of the Capitivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson By Rowlandson, from Project Gutenberg
• The Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather
• Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards
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• Next: Revolutionary Writers >>
• Last Updated: Aug 24, 2023 1:56 PM
• URL: https://library.cbc.edu/americanlit1

Religious Tenets in American Puritan Literature: Bradford and Rowlandson Essay

Introduction, the main puritan beliefs, reflection of puritan tenets in literature.

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It’s a well-known fact that all literary schools were influenced by various historical, political or religious processes. Puritanism in America was not an exception. This school started as religious movement in Britain and tightly rooted itself into American society and literature of the XVIIth century becoming one of the major schools and making a great impact on the further development of American literature.

Puritanism as a religious movement established its own system of beliefs and rules that was implemented into literary school that attracted many authors of that period. The most renowned representatives of this school are W. Bradford, M. Rowlandson, A. Bradstreet, E. Taylor, J. Edwards. In this paper I’d like to concentrate my attention on two writers from the Puritan period: William Bradford and Mary Rowlandson and try to examine how their works incorporate the tenets Puritanism.

Before analyzing the works in terms of their belonging to Puritanism I believe it’s important to identify the main characteristics of Puritan style and intentions and aims the authors put forward to transfer their message to the reader. Closely tight with the religion and affected by it, American Puritan writers aspired to transform and praise religion and God in their works, but they also expressed the needs and desires of people of that period.

Since the Puritan works catered basically for common people it was typical of them to be written in plain style with clear expression of thought and virtually absence of figures of speech (Perkins 133). Nevertheless, this fact doesn’t mean that the authors themselves were illiterate and incapable of using elaborate high sounding language; otherwise, it was rather the opposition to rules and skilled writers. Therefore, Bradford doesn’t make use of metaphors and his works don’t abound in various figures of speech, which stands for his idea of simple life and hard work that purifies from sins.

Moreover, Puritan writers regarded God as supreme authority over human beings, which resulted in their continuous pursue to moral purity and severe fight against sin. Puritan school representatives tended to live an obedient and modest life, which reflected in their works, mostly, diaries and histories. The writings were based on Biblical model – individual life was perceived as a “”journey to salvation” and deliverance from sins (Perkins 231). Thus, Bradford’s most famous book Of Plymouth Plantation is influenced greatly by his Puritan background. Telling the story of the Pilgrims and the early years of the Colony of Puritans, their hardships of escape to New York and the unshakable belief in God despite all the obstacles on their way, the book reflect the idea of total submission to God and, thus, every mishap is regarded as God’s punishment and every success as God’s blessing.

Mary Rowlandson’s The Narrative of Captivity where she tells a story of the community that was destroyed by Indians it is also “an extreme example of strict Puritan faith” (Breitwieser 127). Being separated from her husband, she with a small child has to travel with the Indians in terrifying conditions only with water to drink she stick to her Puritan beliefs and thanked god: “I have thought of the wonderful goodness of God to me in preserving me in the use of my reasons and senses in that distressed time, that I did not use wicked and violent means to end my own miserable life” (Breitwieser 155). Rowlandson always addresses God “in times of danger and pain; she believes that all the unfavourable conditions that she has endured have a purpose” (Breitwieser 156). Besides, she saw her life in the light of Biblical stories and used allusions to them in their works.

Concluding, I’d like to say that Puritanism literature reflected Puritan devotion to God and Bible as the embodiment of the Word, their beliefs of simple uncorrupted life and hard work.

Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative. Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Perkins, George, and Perkins, Barbara. The American Tradition in Literature, Vol 1. McGraw-Hill, 1999.

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IvyPanda. (2021, December 16). Religious Tenets in American Puritan Literature: Bradford and Rowlandson. https://ivypanda.com/essays/religious-tenets-in-american-puritan-literature-bradford-and-rowlandson/

"Religious Tenets in American Puritan Literature: Bradford and Rowlandson." IvyPanda , 16 Dec. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/religious-tenets-in-american-puritan-literature-bradford-and-rowlandson/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Religious Tenets in American Puritan Literature: Bradford and Rowlandson'. 16 December.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Religious Tenets in American Puritan Literature: Bradford and Rowlandson." December 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/religious-tenets-in-american-puritan-literature-bradford-and-rowlandson/.

1. IvyPanda . "Religious Tenets in American Puritan Literature: Bradford and Rowlandson." December 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/religious-tenets-in-american-puritan-literature-bradford-and-rowlandson/.

IvyPanda . "Religious Tenets in American Puritan Literature: Bradford and Rowlandson." December 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/religious-tenets-in-american-puritan-literature-bradford-and-rowlandson/.

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THE INFLUENCE OF PURITANISM ON AMERICAN LITERATURE

Because the 17th Century was the great age of British religious literature, in New England, therefore, asserts Darrel Abel, it was the great century of Puritan literature. In a way which is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate, Abel further submits, this literary genre was not only a subject of everyday life, but was an intelligent, often artistically wrought literature. It was also strenuous and serious, because Puritans saw life as an unremitting moral struggle. Puritan literature attempted to represent life truly; moreover, Puritan literature was just as " realistic " as modern naturalism, albeit in the service of a different perception of reality. The great structure of the Puritan creed, Perry Miller has asserted, will only be meaningful to most students today " when they perceive that it rested upon a deep lying conviction that the universe conformed to a definite, ascertainable truth, and that human existence was to be had only upon the terms imposed by this truth. " Plain speech was the high literary value of this society, as expressed by William Bradford, who enjoined " a plain style, with singular regard to the simple truth in all things. Ornate and embellished stylistics were distrusted as adornments and adulterations; sensuous tropes and imagery were seen as the literary analogs to the perceived idolatry and ceremonial trappings of the Anglicans and Catholics. " Painted sermons " were an abomination, since they were like painted windows that obscured the clear light of truth, and the " words of wisdom " were privileged over the " wisdom of words. " This plain style was distinct, orderly, emphatic and proportionate, while employing rhetorical devices sanctioned by Biblical use: parables and analogies, similes and metaphors, rhythmic and formal syntax. While Miller and Thomas Johnson opine that the Puritans failed to develop a lively aesthetic sense in their appreciation of music, painting, and sculpture, George Waller points to the poetry of Ann Bradstreet and Edward Taylor as evidence that piety did not altogether preclude an aesthetic sensibility which appreciated the glories of nature or imagery that was at least colorful, if not sensuous. Furthermore, there a pragmatic element to this style, inasmuch as its audience was comprised of many unlettered common people. Nevertheless, most Puritan writers were literate and learned, and their plain style, holds Abel, was not the meagerness of illiteracy, but rather the restraint of " skilled and instructed writers. " As Renaissance men, their respect for learning, their relish for the word fitly spoken, and their energy and robustness gave vigor even to writing that held humanity to be contemptible in its character and vain in all of its works. Gustaaf Van Cromphout has posited Cotton Mather as the most impressive exemplar of the Renaissance Man in American Puritanism, remarking that his magnum opus, Magnalia Christi Americana of 1702 is not only colonial history and glorification of its faith, but also " a work whose style and rhetoric reveal his adherence to humanist literary principles. " Mather, along with Robert Beverly, may be seen as a Founding Father of American literary criticism as well. The two great Anglo-American literary giants of the colonial period, Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, while usually distinguished from each other in terms of the provincial minister versus the cosmopolitan man-of-the-world, shared a commonality which, while less obvious, is no less significant. Edwards, conversant in the ideas of Newton and Locke, combined science and philosophy as a basis for a body of religious literature unrivaled in logical and literary perfection in the entire history of human writing. Franklin's Autobiography, the sort of self-improvement tract favored by the early Puritans, used formulaic conventions of the spiritual autobiography borrowed from them while espousing his own worldly wisdoms. Franklin expropriated the Protestant/Puritan work ethic to serve his secular humanism, which embraced the ethical morality of Puritanism and modernized it in the

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What is Puritan Spirit – History , Writers and Their Beliefs

What is Puritan Spirit in detail, What is Puritan Spirit – History , Writers and Their Beliefs , The Puritan spirit is a historical and cultural phenomenon that emerged during the 16th and 17th centuries in England and subsequently had a profound impact on American society.

What is Puritan Spirit – Rooted in a strict interpretation of Protestant Christianity, Puritanism was characterized by a strong emphasis on moral purity, hard work, and a fervent pursuit of religious devotion. In this article, we will delve into the origins of Puritanism, its core beliefs, its influence on American society, and its modern interpretations.

Table of Contents

What is Puritan Spirit ?

The Puritan spirit refers to the collective mindset and values of the Puritans, a religious group that sought to reform the Church of England and establish a more pure and righteous form of worship. Puritans believed in a personal and direct relationship with God and sought to align every aspect of their lives with biblical principles. What is Puritan Spirit – History , Writers and Their Beliefs 

The Puritans were a religious group that emerged within the Protestant movement in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. They sought to “purify” the Church of England from what they considered to be remnants of Catholic practices and doctrines.

#History of Puritanism

Puritanism originated during the 16th century as a response to what its followers perceived as corruption and ritualism within the Church of England. The movement gained momentum under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and reached its peak during the English Civil War in the 17th century.

During the 16th century, England underwent religious reforms that led to the establishment of the Church of England, separating from the authority of the Pope in Rome. However, some individuals within the Church of England felt that the reforms did not go far enough in purifying the church of what they considered to be remnants of Catholicism.

These individuals, known as Puritans, advocated for a stricter form of Protestantism that emphasized simplicity, purity, and a direct relationship with God. They sought to remove any remaining elements of Catholic ritual and hierarchy from the Church of England.

Puritanism gained significant influence during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who attempted to find a middle ground between the Puritans and more traditional factions within the church. However, tensions continued to rise as Puritans faced increasing resistance and persecution from the authorities.

The English Civil War in the 17th century further fueled the growth of Puritanism. The conflict between the supporters of the king and the parliament provided an opportunity for Puritans to gain political power. Puritan leaders, such as Oliver Cromwell, played pivotal roles in the war and ultimately led to the execution of King Charles I.

During this time, Puritanism became closely associated with republican ideals and a desire for religious freedom. Puritan influence extended beyond the church and into various aspects of society, including politics, education, and culture.

However, with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Puritan influence began to decline. The new king, Charles II, sought to suppress Puritanism and reinstate Anglicanism as the dominant religious and political force in England.

Despite its decline in England, Puritanism continued to have a lasting impact, particularly through the migration of Puritan settlers to the New World. These settlers, known as the Pilgrims and Puritans, established colonies in present-day New England, such as Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plymouth Colony, where they could practice their religion freely.

The historical background of Puritanism provides insights into the social, religious, and political factors that shaped this movement. It helps us understand the origins of the Puritan spirit and its subsequent influence on American society.

#Puritan Age Writers and Works

#beliefs of puritanism, 1) predestination and divine providence.

According to Puritan theology, God’s sovereignty extends to every aspect of human life, including salvation. They believed that God chose a select group of individuals, known as the “elect,” for salvation even before the creation of the world. The rest of humanity, referred to as the “reprobate,” were destined for damnation.

Puritans saw their own salvation as evidence of God’s grace and favor. They viewed their worldly successes or failures as signs of divine providence and a reflection of God’s will. This belief in predestination and divine providence gave Puritans a sense of purpose and assurance in their lives, as they saw themselves as part of God’s grand plan.

However, the doctrine of predestination also created tensions and dilemmas within Puritan communities. On one hand, it provided a sense of comfort and confidence to those who believed they were among the elect. On the other hand, it raised questions about the nature of God’s justice and the role of human agency.

Puritans believed that they had a moral responsibility to live righteous lives and pursue holiness, even though their ultimate salvation was predetermined. They saw their earthly actions and behaviors as reflections of their faith and obedience to God’s commandments.

While the concept of predestination and divine providence was central to Puritan theology, it also sparked debates and controversies, both within the Puritan community and with other religious groups. It challenged notions of free will, human responsibility, and the fairness of God’s judgment.

2) The Doctrine of Original Sin

According to Puritan theology, the sin of Adam and Eve resulted in the fall of humanity, causing a separation between humanity and God. As a consequence, every individual is born with a sinful nature inherited from their ancestors. This original sin taints human beings from birth, making them prone to disobedience, selfishness, and moral transgressions.

Puritans believed that the stain of original sin affected all aspects of human existence, including thoughts, desires, and actions. They saw sin as a universal condition, extending to every person regardless of age, social status, or personal virtue.

The doctrine of original sin emphasized the fallen nature of humanity and the desperate need for salvation. Puritans believed that only through repentance, faith in Jesus Christ, and the grace of God could individuals be cleansed from their original sin and restored to a right relationship with God.

The recognition of original sin also influenced Puritan views on the role of discipline and self-discipline. Puritans saw the battle against sin as a lifelong struggle, and they placed great emphasis on personal accountability, moral discipline, and spiritual growth. They believed that resisting sinful temptations and striving for holiness were essential aspects of their Christian journey.

Puritans practiced self-examination, introspection, and confession of sins as means of confronting their fallen nature and seeking God’s forgiveness. They believed that true repentance and the pursuit of righteousness were necessary for salvation and the experience of God’s grace.

The doctrine of original sin was not unique to Puritanism but was shared by various Christian traditions. However, Puritans placed a particular emphasis on the pervasive influence of sin in human life and the need for personal transformation through a deep, inward spiritual experience.

3) The Pursuit of Holiness and Hard Work

The pursuit of holiness and hard work were key principles in Puritanism. Puritans believed that living a life of holiness and diligently engaging in productive work were not only religious obligations but also essential for personal and communal well-being.

Puritans viewed holiness as a reflection of God’s grace and a response to His saving power. They believed that those who had been elected for salvation should strive for moral purity, spiritual growth, and obedience to God’s commandments. Pursuing holiness meant actively resisting sin, cultivating virtues, and seeking a deeper relationship with God.

The pursuit of holiness extended to all aspects of life. Puritans emphasized the importance of family, education, and community in fostering a godly society. They saw their daily activities as opportunities to glorify God, whether through their work, relationships, or service to others.

Hard work was regarded as a virtue and a means of demonstrating one’s faithfulness and dedication to God. Puritans believed that idleness and laziness were sinful, as they wasted the precious time and resources that God had entrusted to them. They viewed work as a calling from God and an avenue for fulfilling one’s responsibilities and serving others.

Puritans embraced the Protestant work ethic, which emphasized the value of industriousness, discipline, and frugality. They believed that success in one’s work, whether in business, agriculture, or any other occupation, was a sign of God’s favor and a reward for their diligence.

The pursuit of holiness and hard work intertwined in the Puritan mindset. They saw their labor as an act of worship and an opportunity to glorify God. Hard work was not merely a means of economic prosperity but also a way to exercise stewardship, contribute to the community, and fulfill one’s calling in life.

The Puritan emphasis on the pursuit of holiness and hard work left a lasting impact on American society. These values became deeply ingrained in the culture, influencing the development of a strong work ethic, personal responsibility, and the belief in the possibility of individual progress and success.

Today, the ideals of holiness and hard work continue to resonate in various spheres of life. The pursuit of personal excellence, dedication to one’s vocation, and the desire to make a positive impact on society can be seen as legacies of the Puritan spirit.

#What is Puritan Spirit their Lifestyle and Values

Simplicity and Frugality – Puritans embraced a simple and frugal lifestyle, rejecting ostentatious displays of wealth and luxury. They believed that material possessions were distractions from spiritual matters and focused on the essentials of life.

Education and Literacy- Puritans emphasized the importance of education and literacy as a means to study and understand the Bible. They established schools and universities, such as Harvard College, to ensure the proper education of their children.

Sabbath Observance – Observing the Sabbath was a fundamental aspect of Puritan life. They dedicated Sundays to worship, rest, and religious contemplation. Activities such as work, recreation, and entertainment were strictly regulated or prohibited.

#Influence of Puritanism on American Society

The founding of the new england colonies.

Puritanism played a significant role in the establishment of the New England colonies, such as Massachusetts Bay Colony, Connecticut Colony, and Plymouth Colony. These colonies were founded by Puritan settlers seeking religious freedom and a society governed by their religious principles.

Impact on Political and Legal Systems

Puritan ideas of governance and moral order shaped the political and legal systems of the American colonies. The concept of a covenant between God and the people influenced the development of representative government and the idea of individual rights.

Legacy in American Literature and Culture

Puritanism left a lasting imprint on American literature and culture. Writers such as Jonathan Edwards and Anne Bradstreet explored themes of sin, salvation, and God’s sovereignty in their works. Puritan ideals of hard work, self-discipline, and moral responsibility continue to resonate in American society.

Read Also  :  Write A Critical Note On The Ideology Of Puritanism Reflected In American Literature

Puritans themselves were not immune to intolerance and persecution. They sought religious freedom for themselves but often denied it to others who held differing beliefs. Dissenters, such as Quakers, were frequently persecuted and banished from Puritan communities.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 remain a dark chapter in the history of Puritanism. The trials, characterized by hysteria and false accusations, resulted in the execution of several individuals accused of witchcraft. The events served as a cautionary tale of the dangers of religious extremism and intolerance.

In contemporary society, the Puritan spirit is often invoked to describe a strong work ethic, moral rigor, and a commitment to personal responsibility. While the religious fervor of the original Puritans has waned, their emphasis on self-discipline and the pursuit of excellence continues to influence various spheres of life.

The Puritan spirit emerged as a religious and cultural movement with a profound impact on both English and American history. Puritans’ unwavering devotion to their beliefs, their contributions to education and governance, and their influence on American literature and culture shaped the foundation of modern society. While the Puritan era may be long gone, its legacy endures, reminding us of the complexities of religious fervor, the pursuit of righteousness, and the quest for a better world.

Read Also :  The Puritans | American Literature

Q1. Were all Puritans intolerant and persecutors?

While the Puritans sought religious freedom for themselves, they were not entirely tolerant of other religious beliefs and frequently persecuted dissenters.

Q2. Did Puritanism have a lasting impact on American society?

Yes, Puritanism had a lasting impact on American society, particularly in shaping its political, legal, and cultural foundations.

Q3. Are there any modern descendants of Puritan communities?

Some modern communities claim descent from Puritan settlers, particularly in New England. However, the religious practices and beliefs of these communities have evolved over time.

Q.4 What were Puritans spiritual beliefs?

The Puritans believed  God had chosen a few people, “the elect,” for salvation . The rest of humanity was condemned to eternal damnation.

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