Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism by Bryce Traister

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

As anyone who teaches a survey in early American literature can attest, one of the difficulties of the course is conveying to our students our interest in and passion for early American studies. Students often have no background in the texts, history, or culture of the early period. Unlike in courses in later American literature, they cannot readily bring their inde pendent readings to bear on, say, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan or Mary Rowlandson's Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Even when they have heard of the authors or events under discussion, they are as likely to mis take anachronistic or contemporary representations for historical context. They know Pocahontas through the Disney movie; they're sure women accused of witchcraft in Salem were ducked and burned (after all, they sculpted a diorama of such trials in their sixth-grade social studies class). I've had students tell me that Olaudah Equiano's narrative was boring be cause his description of slavery was not as visceral as that of Toni Morrison in Beloved. This last example aside, most students are interested in hearing the real story as conveyed by our big, authoritative anthologies. Neverthe less, few members of my survey class are there by choice. Most take it to fulfill requirements for the major. And it's clear in the first weeks that many students ?graduates too! ?often cannot fathom why we are so obsessed with pre-1800 materials.1 I suspect many survey-takers make their way through the course wondering why, if I could have chosen to read and study Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, or Alice Walker (whose works have obvi ous merit, as my students assure me), a smart woman like me went for Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (never mind the horrors of Cotton Mather and James Fenimore Cooper). This state of affairs continues in such classes until quite late in the semester, when stu dents have a critical mass of readings on which to draw. It's only then

Puritans and Pilgrims Christopher Grasso New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration. Early American History. By Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 582 pages. Cloth, ebook. One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginnings of English New England. By Francis J. Bremer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 267 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. By David D. Hall. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019. 525 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The World of Plymouth Plantation. By Carla Gardina Pestana. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. 244 pages. Cloth, ebook. They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty. By John G. Turner. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2020. 459 pages. Cloth, ebook. There was a time, a couple of scholarly generations ago, when a certain breed of graduate student in early American history seemed to embrace Giles Corey as their patron saint. Corey had been accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692, but as the sheriff piled stone after stone upon him to force him to plea, Corey merely called for “more weight.”1 Three centuries later, [End Page 121] Corey’s New England Puritans appeared vital to understanding American religious and intellectual history. “Begin with Perry Miller’s two volumes on The New England Mind and work forward,” our mentors said. And as the next dense explication of Puritan theology or a six-hundred-page meditation on the cultural meanings of Plymouth Rock was added to our already long reading lists, like Corey we grinned or grimaced and called for more weight.2 But scholars have ceased to habitually plumb Puritanism for the deep sources of the “American mind” or the “American self.” We have long known how much Max Weber missed when he saw the Puritan strain of Protestantism as the font of “individualism.” We have long recognized that, despite the appropriations of politicians such as Ronald Reagan, John Winthrop’s 1630 invocation of a “city on a hill” was not a prophecy of American exceptionalism. In the pages of the William and Mary Quarterly at the end of the last century, Charles L. Cohen pronounced the end of the Puritan paradigm in early American religious history.3 New England Puritans, once dour giants bestriding American Studies, retreated to the hills and hollows of scholarly subspecialty, occasionally reemerging more fully as denizens of the seventeenth-century British Atlantic world. Perhaps most contemporary Americans only think of grim witch-hunting Puritans on Halloween and buckle-hatted Pilgrims on Thanks-giving, not giving much thought to the connections between the two. But most of the English settlers founding Plymouth were very much part of the larger movement that David D. Hall describes in his synthetic survey, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Hall himself is not much interested in the small Plymouth branch of the much larger Puritan tree. The other volumes under review here, however, each published with an eye toward the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower’s voyage, pay close attention to the significance of the Puritan version of “hot Protestantism” in that colony, even if they come to different conclusions.4 [End Page 122] Hall writes that when he began his doctoral work in 1959, historians of early New England tended to have “colonists unpack the luggage labeled Puritanism and magically turn into ‘founders’ of the America-to-be—founders of a literary tradition or something resembling democracy, and especially founders of a ready-made ‘identity’” (10). He names some of the leading American scholars who introduced the Atlantic turn to their studies of Puritan theology and practice: “Michael McGiffert, E. Brooks Holifield, Baird Tipson, W. G. B. Stoever, Theodore Dwight Bozeman, and Charles Hambrick-Stowe” (10–11) and also “Norman Fiering, Charles Lloyd Cohen, Francis J. Bremer, Richard Cogley, and Stephen Foster” (11). Most would add Hall to this list of luminaries. To an even longer list of British scholars, the name of Patrick Collinson stands out as a major influence. Hall’s early monograph, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the...

This dissertation studies the many ways in which physical pain produces instances of personal piety in poems, narratives, and theological tracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Puritan New England. Specifically, the project revises the idea that spiritual regeneration happened only through Puritan contacts with established liturgical means and precast homiletics; it contends instead that conversion occurred because of bodily pain. Analyzing four canonical Puritan writers--Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards--Theologies of Pain demonstrates that texts of even the most historically mainstream Puritans contend with the disruptive force of pain. Anne Bradstreet sees pain as an object of contemplation destabilizing the semiotics of the human body inherited from ancient and Renaissance philosophy. For Mary Rowlandson, it is a paradoxically reassuring force that allows her to retain her spiritual identity while under captivity in the wilderness of western New England. Cotton Mather, perhaps the most loquacious spokesperson for the Puritans in this study, theorizes that pain is a uniquely divine sensation that reorients thinking. And Jonathan Edwards--by contrast to the three other writers--reasons that pain is never a sensation but is, instead, a posture of mind attributable only to the unregenerate, or "natural," man. After conversion, pain becomes negated in Edwards's theology. This project thus shows that in New England Puritanism, pain resists collective interpretation and, instead, signifies intensely in its adherents' personal expressions of piety.

Florens in Salem Kristina Bross (bio) Reading A Mercy in an undergraduate class focused on seventeenth-century magical belief made for an alchemical experience. When I have taught the book in other kinds of courses, students took Florens's belief in the supernatural, particularly her reports of signs and omens, as idiosyncratic, expressions of a particular ignorant or wounded character within a culture like our own, built on a rational understanding of the world. Placing Morrison's work next to wonder tales and witchcraft [End Page 183] trials, however, we experienced a kind of sympathetic vibration in which both the novel and its historical antecedents seem sharper and more resonant. I used the novel as a capstone text for students in an upper-level undergraduate course I entitled "Witchcraft and Wonder in Early American Literature," a course that surveyed three moments of wonder or magic in colonial New England: the Antinomian controversy, the Salem witchcraft outbreak, and the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic. Among the students' assignments was a response paper discussing how the history of witchcraft in America is used in Morrison's novel.4 My aim was simple: to find out which elements of our historical study had stayed with them, and by applying that historical study to a contemporary work, to prompt them to see the ways that their study of the past could be used in criticism of contemporary events and culture. Having read of monstrous births, babies with scales and horns who were the direct reflection of the mother's heresies; of witchy descriptions of ghostly, glowing jellyfish laid out on a fireplace mantle; of animals and children struck down by a look, my students were primed to read all kinds of wonders as possible within Morrison's historical-fictional universe, set as it is in the years leading up to the Salem witchcraft trials. They approached A Mercy with a suspension of disbelief in which a kettle's steam really can shape itself into a dog's head omen, men's spirits actually do rise from their graves, and young girls are bewitched by strange men. Returning to the historic materials after reading the novel, they took from Morrison a sense of the poignancy of the situation in Salem in 1692. Reading historical accounts of wonder caused them to suspend disbelief as they read of Florens's magical signs or Rebekka's ghosts. Moreover, after reading Morrison, they seemed to find it easier to see how the seventeenth-century belief in an enchanted universe permeated all who were involved, that accusations of witchcraft were not (always) in bad faith, even if the results were scandalous, and that scapegoating is never a simple or straightforward evil. For this short essay, I want to focus on the reading we constructed together of chapter 7, one of Florens's chapters, in which Florens journeys into the wilderness in search of her blacksmith lover, finds a night's refuge in the house of Widow Ealing and her daughter Jane, and becomes the focus of a witch hunt. Florens's journey takes place in 1690, just two years before the Salem witchcraft trials began. My students noticed immediately [End Page 184] details that had not struck me as significant in my earlier readings. For instance, the chapter opens with Florens's portentous dream of "cherry trees walking toward me. . . . One bends down and I wake with a little scream in my mouth" (101). We knew from our reading of David Hall's Worlds of Wonder that such dreams were often taken as supernatural signs in the seventeenth century. Florens wakes to realize that "nothing is different," but my students nonetheless read the wild landscape as haunted: a clearing "remember[s] the burning of itself " (102). The air is filled with "bird talk"—which my students thought resonated with Salem accounts of familiars in the shape of little yellow birds. Even her encounter with flesh-and-blood people, young Native men who give her food and water, partakes of the magical: "I blink and they all disappear" (103). Soon after, Florens leaves the haunted landscape of the wilderness and lands in a proto-Salem village, just two years before the historic...

"Another Play on Salem Witch Trials":Lion Feuchtwanger, Communists, and Nazis Waltraud Maierhofer (bio) The Crucible (1953), by pre-eminent American playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005), has become widely acknowledged as a timeless play about the hunt for "witches" and other supposed evildoers, and about mass hysteria. According to a popular introduction to this work, the inspiration for Arthur Miller's play was The Devil in Massachusetts (1949), a historical study, albeit not without fictional elements, about the Salem witch trials by Marion Starkey.1 It is a little-known fact that the German-Jewish émigré writer Lion Feuchtwanger (7 July 1884, Munich–21 December 1958, Los Angeles) published a play about the Salem trials before Arthur Miller did. It was published in German under the title Wahn oder Der Teufel in Boston (Mania or The Devil in Boston) in 1948 in Los Angeles.2 A first sketch is dated 22 October 1945.3 Feuchtwanger began writing the play in the final months of 1946 and finished it in late 1947. I. The Devil in Boston The play premiered in Germany in March 1949, in the "Kleines Theater im Zoo" in Frankfurt am Main, directed by Fred Schroer. Feuchtwanger wrote a short statement about his play for the program, "Zu meinem Stück" (About My Play).4 The premiered version was slightly revised from the first American edition in German, and subsequent performances (Deutsches Theater Berlin, March 1949; Nürnberg, 1949) and book editions followed.5 Several stages of typescript translations in English are extant in the Feuchtwanger Archive at the University of Southern California, the first [End Page 355] dated August 1947. The titles vary slightly from Delusion to Boston to Devil in Boston, which appears to have met Feuchtwanger's final approval, and a corrected copy is marked "Copyright 1948").6 Feuchtwanger wanted to have the play performed in the United States in English, but was not immediately successful.7 The American-language premiere did not take place until February 1952 at the Circle Theatre in Hollywood (directed by Benjamin Zemach), where it remained in the repertoire for only half a year.8 Another staging, of a Yiddish translation by N[athaniel] Buchwald, took place the next year in New York by the Yiddish Theater Ensemble, in Barbiyon Plaza. Morris Carnovsky directed and performed in this production.9 Arthur Miller's Crucible (1953) premiered on Broadway on 22 January 1953 and was published that same year. Initially, it was not as sweepingly successful as it later became. Feuchtwanger's drama had its New York premiere in February 1953. The audience, including the critics, did not know of its earlier publication in German and its staging on the West Coast, leading one critic to label it as "Another Play On Salem Witches."10 Reviews of the New York performance immediately compared the two: Vernon Rice pointed out that Feuchtwanger's play had fewer dramatic high points, while his simpler plot and setting fared favorably with John Chapman. It is not important for the following argument whether the two writers knew about each other's plays and whether one might have influenced the other,11 although it remains a valid question. Both draw attention to the mechanisms and dynamics of suspicion, denunciation, persecution, and extermination. Their approaches are very different in that Miller shows trial scenes onstage, while Feuchtwanger has them reported. Both fictionalize one of the "bewitched" girls and main plaintiffs, and incorporate love interests in her characterization, but these choices result in decisive plot differences. However, my goal is not to compare the two plays, but rather to examine the specific perspective of a stateless immigrant on this "American" topic, which the German-Jewish writer here applies to postwar, post-Nazi Germany. Even Feuchtwanger scholarship tends to bypass this play. For example, a recent study on the reception of Feuchtwanger's works in Germany since 1945 only briefly touches on the play, stating as evident that it represented the author's reaction to the beginning of the McCarthy era and intended to draw parallels between persecutions of "witches" and leftists.12 Only [End Page 356] one short comparison with Miller's Crucible has been undertaken, in which Robert...

The American Puritan layman Samuel Sewall (d. 1730) is perhaps best known as a diarist and as a repentant judge in the Salem witchcraft trials. But he was also the author of Phaenomena quaedam apocalyptica (first edition 1697), a work which argued that the New Jerusalem would arise in Mexico City. Sewall’s unusual millennial doctrine may seem undeserving of study, for no other American Puritan thought that the New Jerusalem would first appear in Mexico City or anywhere else in New Spain. Yet when properly contextualized, the Mexican millennium is worth investigating for two reasons. First, it accentuates what the American Puritan millenarian mainstream, best exemplified by John Cotton, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather, believed about the coming kingdom. Second, the Mexican millennium, like the mainstream position, challenges the academic claim that American Puritan millenarians characteristically believed that they were destined to inaugurate the millennial kingdom in New England.

Early American Literature as a Networked FieldMary Rowlandson, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie Wai Chee Dimock (bio) In thinking about Early American Literature at fifty, and looking forward to the fifty years ahead, one concept that I’d like to propose is that of a “networked field.” I hope I’m not simply being trendy, taking a word that describes the online phenomenology of the present moment and projecting it backward to an early period. “Network” is a current term, but one with heuristic implications extending beyond the twenty-first century, and with enough critical oomph to give us a push in a new direction, in ways that might help broaden the scope of the early American field and put it on a more experimental footing. user-generated input Among other things, the concept of “network” gives us a chance to do something other than the work of traditional historical scholarship: the work of channeling a past presumed to be empirically observable, verifiable, and recoverable. “Positivism” is the name offered by its detractors, highlighting the indebtedness of history as an academic discipline to the nineteenth-century philosophy of August Comte, with its twofold faith in the empirical method as a guarantor of objectivity and in the social world as a field of knowledge that can be investigated in this way. The most common assumption among historians, Jackson Lears says, is “that the facts about the past are ‘out there,’ that the historian’s primary task is to collect them” (58). What makes this fact gathering not haphazard, not an exercise in futility, is a second assumption, that the past is stable, unchanging, and interference free, an object that will stay fixed, transferring its information to the historian when properly approached. [End Page 103] This is the rallying cry and legitimizing ground for history as a disciplinary formation. Two practices follow, as critically summarized by R. G. Collingwood: (1) Each fact was to be regarded as a thing capable of being ascertained by a separate act of cognition or process of research, and thus the total field of the historically knowable was cut up into a infinity of minute facts each to be separately considered. (2) Each fact was to be thought of not only as independent of all the rest but as independent of the knower, so that all subjective elements (as they were called) in the historian’s point of view had to be eliminated. (131) Objectified in this way, historical inquiry simply becomes a linear flow of data, the movement of facts from one point to another point, a movement apparently conducted in a vacuum, or at least a transparent medium. It is guaranteed to happen, but will happen only in one direction, from the point of origin to the point of reception: direct, unimpeded, and uncomplicated by the latter. The historian and the circumstances under which he or she writes are simply not a factor here: never a filter, a screen, a barrier, and perhaps not even a conduit. Mediation is not a problem, for the simple reason that it is not recognized to exist. A network is nothing if not mediation. A linear flow of data is almost impossible here, in this densely populated and crisscrossing landscape, where pathways are routed through multiple sites, interactive at every point, so that the nodes of transfer are also the nodes where data are modified, compounded, added to. User-generated input is what drives these networks, an intervening force that changes not only the overall shapes of the working ensembles but also their distribution of agency, giving rise to common net phenomena such as percolating, cascading, viral spreading, and so on (Barrat, Barthelemy, and Vespignani; Watts). Remixing and repurposing follow as a result, but without homogenizing the field, and without collapsing the initial distances among the participating terms. Rather, heterogeneity, what the network starts out with, remains its energizing force and its ongoing basis for association. User-generated input is especially interesting as it bears on our conception of history. What are the effects on the past when it is thrown into a dynamic field of this sort, with feedback loops often coming from odd angles and unexpected quarters...

Who Narrates Captivity? Rebecca Anne Goetz (bio) Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. xi + 233 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $75.00. Andrew Newman, Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacies and Indian Captivities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019. xi + 211 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. About sixty years before Mary Rowlandson wrote her famous book The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson (1682), Sarah Boyse also wrote a captivity narrative. Captured by Pamunkeys in March 1622, Boyse was sent home from captivity in 1623 "appareled like one of theire Quenes, wch they [the Pamunkeys] desired wee should take notice of." She observed her captors well: she "reporteth of a great deale of miserie that o[u]r People endure and not least Hunger in wch th'Indians also suffer extreame."1 The Pamunkeys held Sarah and eighteen other English women as captives, but the English were aware they were all alive because her husband John received "a letter from Boyse his wife."2 What information did she include in her letter? We do not know, because her letter does not survive. All that remains is a description of her clothing and her observations on the difficulties of life among the Pamunkeys. But I can begin to imagine what Sarah Boyse's letter might have told us. In addition to her descriptions of hardship and dearth, perhaps like Mary Rowlandson's narrative, Sarah Boyse might have told present-day historians much about Pamunkey politics, about Opechancanough's struggles to hold his confederacy together in the face of unceasing English violence, and the threat of starvation. We might have glimpsed Boyse's piety too, but perhaps without the puritan overtones of Rowlandson's later narrative. The possibility of Sarah Boyse's narrative is one we can imprint with all the things we wish we knew about Indigenous and settler lives in the wake of Opechancanough's devastating attack on English settlements in 1622. [End Page 488] I am able to subject Sarah Boyse to such conjecture because she left only the barest trace in the archive of early Virginia. The Virginia Company did not deem her literacy and her ability to describe her captivity worthy of extensive record. No one archived her (probably handwritten) letter. The men of the Virginia Company happily ignored Boyse's literacy, and thus her narrative. If a woman writes a letter, and no one saves it, does its once-upon-a-time existence matter? Was Sarah Boyse's unloved and unarchived letter a literacy event? Andrew Newman describes literacy events as "the particular activities where reading and writing have a role" (p. 3). In his new book Allegories of Encounter, Andrew Newman delves into one of the most commonly taught and commonly read genres in early American literature: the captivity narrative. In his close reading of the writings of several well-known captives such as Mary Rowlandson, Reverend John Williams, and John Marrant, among others, Newman explores these tales as literacy events, arguing that "captives read and wrote with the presumption that their captors did not—or should not" (p. 7). He describes his approach as "admittedly Eurocentric," and primarily about the "subjective experience of the colonists" who found themselves in captivity, able to return to their colonial homes, and likewise, able to communicate their experience in writing (p. 7). This framing suggests a more limited analysis than the book generally employs, and perhaps does a disservice to Newman's many insightful readings. His focus on settler captives aptly reveals how they used literacy, books, and the written word to distinguish themselves from their Indigenous captors. Newman asks historians and literary scholars to think about the nature of captivity narratives as both primary sources (history) and as texts (literature). The result is a thoughtful meditation on the role of allegory in how settler captives understood their captivity, but also how their captivity narratives expose the "ethnohistorical basis for representations of cultural contact" (p. 16). Newman is...

What Is a Woman?Enclosure and Female Piety in Chaucer's The Knight's Tale Roberta Magnani and Liz Herbert McAvoy Early responses to Geoffrey Chaucer's works and his position in the burgeoning canon of English literature cast him as a patriarchal foundational figure and literary production as an exclusively patrilineal genealogy.1 Chaucer-the-Father thus validates the authorial agency of his literary "sons," and this masculinist way of accounting for canon formation as a father-to-son "straight" trajectory has endured to the present day. Indeed, women's wider intellectual agency and its influence have been largely overlooked. This article, therefore, aims to begin such a process of reparation and posit the profound cultural relevance that women's intellectual practices had on the canon—and on Chaucer, in particular. Accounting for the role of female-coded forms of literacy would derail the conveniently linear patriarchal paradigms on which traditional criticism is founded. Recuperating the centrality of the feminine would unseat male dominance over the canon and demand, at best, its total dismantling and reconstruction, or, at the very least, a concerted interrogation and repudiation of its hegemonic validity. In other words, a radical revisioning of canon formation is made possible by positioning women as queering agents. Recentering "woman" as category and unpacking the question "What is a woman?" in capacious ways extricate it from binary epistemologies. As Sara Ahmed asserts, the queer deviates [End Page 311] from the "straight" lines of heteronormativity founded on an ineluctable patrilinear progression that, through marriage (so central to the narrative and ideology of medieval romance) and reproduction, trace a teleological sequence from birth to death.2 "Woman" reorients the epistemologies of the canon. Far from being marginal, the bodily and the excessive are celebrated for their salvific and generative power; in fact, they turn out to be the shared vocabulary harnessed by the intellectual fathers of medieval culture. We will focus on romance, a genre that is markedly invested in reproducing heteronormative structures couched in a narrative of apparent male subservience to a superior lady, and will demonstrate the extent to which widespread female-coded discourses of spirituality and literacy are profoundly embedded in the modes of writing that Chaucer deploys and the epistemologies he inhabits. The Booke of Gostlye Grace, the Middle English translation of the Liber specialis gratiae produced at the Benedictine nunnery of Helfta in northern Germany under the spiritual direction of the visionary nun Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), will serve as our case study because of its exemplarity; the centrality of Mechthild to the mystical tradition; and the wide circulation of her writing across Europe, both in Latin and in multiple vernacular translations. We are not interested in assimilating Mechthild into a patrilineal genealogy, however: quite the opposite. Nor do we claim any direct influence of Mechthild upon Chaucer, although that is entirely possible. For our purposes, Mechthild functions as an example of the importance and ubiquitous quality of women's literacy and spirituality that saturate the narrative fabric of Chaucer's texts—The Knight's Tale in particular—and that become ostensible in the Amazonian women populating the tale, and the tropes of enclosure and flourishing associated with them, but embedded in non-binary ways in the narrative as a whole. While there is evidence that the book attributed to Mechthild had, indeed, reached England at the time Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, we cannot know for certain whether he was familiar with it, but there is evidence of her widespread renown during the fourteenth century.3 Instead [End Page 312] of claiming direct influence upon Chaucer, we harness Mechthild's spiritual and literary authority as a model for queering traditional theological discourse predicated upon feminine modes of literacy, which, rather than linear, hierarchical, paternal and filial, are collaborative and entangled; as such, they serve as ideal tools for a wider examination of issues such as the discursive elision of gender nonconformity and queer cultural agency.4 And we contend that what is defined as the literary canon, here exemplified by the works of one of its fathers, was profoundly influenced by (and participated in) this model—but in ways that...

There are few episodes in American history as interesting and controversial as the Salem Witch Trials. This work provides a revealing analysis of what it was like to live in Massachusetts during that time, creating a nuanced profile of New England Puritans and their culture. What was it like to live in the colony of Massachusetts during the last decade of the 17th century, the decade famed for the Salem Witch Trials? Daily Life during the Salem Witch Trials answers that question, offering a vivid portrait essential to anyone seeking to understand the traumatic events of the time in their proper historical context. The book begins with a historical overview tracing the development of the Puritan experiment in the Massachusetts colony from 1620 to 1692. It then explores the cultural values and day-to-day concerns of Puritan society in the late-17th century, including trends and patterns of behavior in family life, household activities, business and economics, political and military responsibilities, and religious belief. Each chapter interprets a different aspect of daily life as it was experienced by those who lived through the social crisis of the witch trials of 1692–93, helping readers better comprehend how the history-making events of those years could come to pass.

The Return of the Native:Recent Scholarship in the Literature of Christianization and Contact Phillip H. Round (bio) American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures. Joanna Brooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. vi, 255 pp. Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America. Kristina Bross. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004. 257 pp. The Eliot Tracts: With Letters from John Eliot to Thomas Thorowgood and Richard Baxter. Edited by Michael Clark. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. vii, 452 pp. Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Gordon Sayre. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xxii, 384 pp. The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility. Laura M. Stevens. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 264 pp. Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Hillary Wyss. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. xiii, 207. Attention to native people has ebbed and flowed among students of early American literature, as trends in the broader scholarship emphasized by turns the frontier, the "national character," and American imperialism. But the present interest in Native American culture may be traced to the 1970s, when parallels between America in Southeast Asia and America in Indian Country became nearly inescapable, and—as Gerald Vizenor recalls—the Vietnam War "aroused the nation to remember the inseparable massacres at My Lai, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee" (149). The same period that sawan incredible resurgence in early American literary studies (led by Sacvan Bercovitch's The Puritan Origins of the American Self) also witnessed a reexamination of the "Indian question." While Bercovitch tacitly condemned conformism in American culture by tracing its roots to the hegemonic symbolic and ritual structures of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence (1973), drew direct attention to indigenous peoples' role in American cultural development. Unlike Bercovitch (and Perry Miller before him), Slotkin saw American Indian people as central to "the fatal opposition" that lay at the center of the nation's psyche. "The story of the evolution of an American mythology is," Slotkin wrote, "the story of our too-slow awakening to the significance of the American Indian in the universal scheme of things generally and in our (or his) American world in particular" (17). Over the ensuing thirty years, scholars have awakened. Ethnohistorians like James Axtell set to work examining the reciprocal cultural relations entailed in Native and Euro-American contact, underscoring "the impact the major competing cultures of eastern North America had upon each other" (ix). This trend in the historiography reached its height in 1990, when Richard White published The Middle Ground, a work that forever changed the way American scholars viewed "Indian/White relations." Other historians, like Neal Salisbury and William Simmons, have written sensitive and native-centered accounts of life in the eastern woodlands in [End Page 376] both precontact and postcontact times. Literary scholars, influenced by Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes (Routledge, 1992) and Eric Cheyfitz's The Poetics of Imperialism (Oxford, 1991), began to explore the political dimensions of the narrative constructions from which the previous generation had parsed their "information" about native people in early America. Many found Pratt's description of the discourse of "anticonquest"—the ideological mystification of invasion as disinterested observation—particularly potent. Seeing such texts as Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and Restauration or New Englands First Fruits through "imperial eyes" meant not only re-envisioning colonialism as a discursive practice central to what is known as "early American literature" but also tracing the nuances, the critical political and mercantile purposes for which writing about native peoples was deployed in the early modern period. Viewing contact texts through imperial eyes in turn fostered a fruitful inquiry into the cultural investments of native people who performed in these texts and in texts of their own making. These performances, however filtered by European editors and writers, became recoverable and legible as parts of an emerging set of discourses surrounding colonial resistance. Many of the classic works of early American literary study have now been read to reveal their "point[s] of revolution," where (in Cheyfitz's words) "the colonized began...

Six Lessons from the Just Teach One Project on Recovering Susanna Rowson's Sincerity Lisa West Lesson 1: You might not be teaching the classes that provide the easiest contexts for the Just Teach One project (jto), but that does not mean that you cannot participate in the opportunities jto provides for involving students and faculty in collaborative recovery work. Were I creating a course in which to teach Sincerity; A Novel in a Series of Original Letters, I would have taught a topics class for English majors on early American women writers or literature of the early American republic, courses that would have historicized the text and raised issues prominent in the recovery of Susanna Rowson as a prolific author, an educator, a playwright, and an editor. My ideal course would have included Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Foster's The Coquette, and some writings by Judith Sargent Murray, as well as secondary sources about women's education in the 1790s, early American magazines, conduct literature, and coverture. Instead, my predetermined course assignments for fall 2015 included "The Salem Witch Trials" (an upper-level course for majors), "Approaches to American Literature" (a lower-level course with a diverse population, ranging from education majors seeking their English endorsement to non-majors taking it to fulfill university "written communication" requirements), and a topical first-year seminar titled "Jane Austen: Property and Propriety." I decided I could insert Rowson's Sincerity into the "Approaches to American Literature" course, which I was teaching as a course focusing on social issues of the 1820s. I placed it after Hope Leslie, Hobomok, and a unit on the Boudinot-Gold letters collected in To Marry an Indian. Students would already have encountered both nonfiction letters and letters within novels, and our earlier texts would have invited discussion about marriage, women's education, women's economic rights, and the ways texts rhetorically and structurally critique patriarchy. Although Sincerity clearly stuck out on the syllabus as the only primary text not written in the 1820s, I figured there was enough thematic connection with other texts to make it work. I then took a hard look at my first-year seminar class. These are classes that do not fulfill major requirements, so there is more leeway to adjust course goals and experiment with pedagogy. I announced on the first day that we would [End Page 172] be reading Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Sincerity. The last novel, I explained, would replace Pride and Prejudice on the reading list. It was not written by Jane Austen; it was not even (really) British. But it was set in England and Ireland and in roughly the same time period as the Austen novels, and, in fact, a later version (retitled Sarah, or The Exemplary Wife) was actually published in the very same year as Austen's most beloved classic: 1813. No one complained, but I was worried. I wish I had already (re)learned my Lesson 2: Susanna Rowson is indeed a transatlantic figure, and her writings were published and read in both England and America. Rowson created memorable British and American characters; her settings likewise demonstrate her awareness of life on both sides of the Atlantic. The recovery of Rowson as a transatlantic figure remains underexplored territory. The 2006 Pearson anthology Transatlantic Romanticism (Newman et al.) includes excerpts from Charlotte Temple but no other Rowson texts. Rowson is not included in this anthology's series of "transatlantic exchanges" on republicanism, women's rights, or other issues, nor is she featured in the sections on transatlantic reception of authors. Rowson is similarly underrepresented in other transatlantic collections. Arguably, Rowson's is a voice that belongs more firmly in such discussions. Why not teach Rowson with Austen? My Austen class provided a wonderful opportunity to consider Rowson outside of strictly American contexts. Class discussions of narrative voice in Northanger Abbey informed students' approach to the text. They noted that Sarah's letters could express intense emotion. They connected these moments to Catherine Morland's indulgence in the gothic as a way to exert agency in her mundane life. For example, in the first letter, Sarah describes her marriage to Darnley: "A coach was at...

Church, State, and Commonwealth:The Transatlantic Puritan Movement in England and America Neal T. Dugre Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds. By Francis J. Bremer. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012. 436 pages. Cloth. Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England. By Abram C. Van Engen. Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 325 pages. Cloth, ebook. Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill. By Michael P. Winship. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. 350 pages. Cloth. Like most puritan divines, the Reverend John Davenport spent a good deal of his adult life explaining the subtleties of his beliefs. These conversations were often informal, but some, including his Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design is Religion, found their way into print. Davenport wrote the Discourse around 1638 or 1639 in response to an unnamed correspondent who wondered "Whether the Right and Power of Chusing Civil Magistrates belongs unto the Church of Christ?"1 In the late 1630s, the answer to that question was of great interest to English audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Puritans in Massachusetts Bay had recently embraced their own brand of congregationalism and adopted a radical form of civil government that entangled ecclesiastical and civil polities by restricting the franchise to male church members, moves that attracted intense scrutiny in England. Over twenty-four pages, Davenport expounded on his views of civil polities and their relationship to the church. Yet before delving into his intricate, six-part argument, he critiqued the inquiry itself. The wording of the [End Page 344] question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. It assumed that ecclesiastical and civil polities together constituted the basic elements of society, but the real foundation was something else entirely: "Christian Communion." In Davenport's taxonomy, "Christian Communion" was the "Genus" of society, and ecclesiastical and civil polities its "Species."2 Although church and state each had different objectives, they shared the goal of promoting the common welfare, of nurturing Christian Communion. Perhaps we too have been asking the wrong questions. Twenty-five years ago, historian David D. Hall bemoaned how out of touch the "half-truths" scholars tell about puritanism in seventeenth-century New England were with recent scholarship.3 Despite a steady stream of monographs published in the intervening decades, historians and literary scholars still grapple with that disconnect. Both Abram C. Van Engen and Francis J. Bremer, for example, promote their studies in part as rebuttals to the tenacious half-truth of stern and unfeeling puritans. All three of the books under review advance a recent revival in puritan studies that is beginning to close this gap. Examining institutions, intangible feelings, and the lived experiences that knit puritans in England and America together, the authors take puritan theology and the intricate bonds between New England's ecclesiastical and civil polities seriously. In recovering the face-to-face interactions and dialogues between individuals from various points on the spectrum of puritan orthodoxy, the authors suggest how puritans moved toward the larger goal of fostering Christian Communion by negotiating relationships among themselves. In Godly Republicanism, Michael P. Winship returns to the beginnings of the puritan movement following the ascension of Queen Elizabeth I and the restoration of Protestantism to England. Described as a "study in applied sacred political theory" (4), the book examines the republican foundations of church and state in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Winship builds on recent English scholarship that locates the roots of republicanism not in the mid-seventeenth century but in Tudor and early Stuart England. Religion has not factored prominently in that historiography, but Winship brings to light "assumptions and webs of concern" (5) that linked puritanism to secular political ideals that we recognize as republicanism. Godly ecclesiastical republicanism and secular republicanism shared common "priorities and anxieties," namely "the dread of the corrupting effects of power, the fear of one-man rule, the emphasis on the consent of the people and on balanced government" (5). Throughout, Winship highlights the surprising and significant [End Page 345] ways that separatists, "black sheep" (7) among puritans and their historians, interacted with radical...

Reviewed by: American Exceptionalism as Religion: Postmodern Discontent by Jordan Carson Christopher Douglas Jordan Carson. American Exceptionalism as Religion: Postmodern Discontent. Ohio State UP, 2020. xxi + 222 pp. Jordan Carson's American Exceptionalism as Religion: Postmodern Discontent is an engaging new entry in contemporary literature and religion studies. Focusing on Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo—two postsecular standbys—in refreshing conversation with Ana Castillo and George Saunders, as well as with Marilynne Robinson, perhaps the greatest living American Christian writer, Carson aims to show how each "portrays American exceptionalism as a compelling but corrupted religion that comprises both an object of belief and a set of disciplines" (23). The book focuses on the ideology qua religion of American exceptionalism, which Carson defines as "the myth of election" (3), "America as a chosen nation" (4) of God's chosen [End Page 577] people on the promised land, distinguishing it from American civil religion. These contemporary writers "aim to divest 'America' of its claim to transcendence and reveal America for what it is: a place and a way of government, a set of nontranscendent but worthy ideals, a place of freedom but also of oppression, not wholly evil but also not a chosen nation" (23). Carson examines the "specific religious practices" depicted by these writers, both good and bad, and "how these practices shape individuals morally, spiritually, emotionally, and aesthetically." Thus, for Carson DeLillo's work is a study in "the damage wrought by misplaced faith" (26), in which characters yearn for transcendence and sometimes come close but only through the apophatic tradition, the attempt to imagine via language a transcendent that lies beyond language. His discussion of DeLillo's use of the apophatic tradition is illuminating and engages with previous discussions (notably John McLure's and Amy Hungerford's) on DeLillo and mystery, even if that mystery "does not offer a coherent theological or spiritual vision" (56). Placing Castillo within the larger frame of Chicano fiction and "liberation theology" (76), Carson's smart analysis of hybrid religion and trickster ethics is alert to nuance. Insofar as American exceptionalism is a form of religion, it ends up being an obstacle to pluralist, hybrid, and mestiza spirituality. Similarly, hybrid pluralism marks the kind of religious engagement Carson finds most evident in Pynchon's fiction, where "spiritual disciplines . . . those depicted unironically and in earnest—translate into greater investment in the world: works of compassion, care for the earth, and opposition to all forms of domination" (131). Spiritual pilgrims, in this sense, stand against the religion of American exceptionalism as "the myth of [American] election" (99). Carson's analysis of empathy and compassion in the fiction of Saunders, perhaps the least-studied among his five authors, is rewarding and smart. Carson shows how Saunders's work repeatedly questions a cluster of negative "spiritual disciplines" (131) associated with American exceptionalism: notions of self-improvement and self-sufficiency, economic gain as moral progress, and the power of positive thinking, which ignores the social world and other people. Carson's reading of Robinson, meanwhile, focuses on her non-fiction essays. In these, "Robinson castigates the resurgent Christian right for surrendering religion to ideology and confusing religious devotion with cultural identity" (171). His critique of Robinson's dismissal of the Christian Right as engaging in "ideology" rather than (true) religion is insightful and refreshing because he treats the ideology [End Page 578] with the same judicious expansion of the term "religion" that he's given to American exceptionalism. Noting that "the semantic slippage in Christian also makes Robinson's own views hard to pin down" (174), Carson persuasively concludes that "Robinson wants her two primary arguments—the essence of Christianity and the essence of democracy—to be heard by two audiences: a narrower Christian audience, and a larger audience of the general American populace." Thus, his interpretation of Robinson's democratic individualism as "a theopoetics that allows for pluralism and diversity to become a source of aesthetic fullness" (199) in Whitman's tradition is likewise convincing and well-articulated. Intriguingly, Carson expands his discussion of American exceptionalism to include related discourses such as the American dream. In DeLillo's and Castillo's works, the dream's ideology of success...