Abstract
Abstract The Puritans followed a long and venerable tradition when they depicted Christian faith with female imagery. Origen, Jerome, Augus¬tine, Gregory the Great, Anselm, and other church fathers had de¬ scribed both the church and the Christian soul as the bride of Christ. In the late-medieval period, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St. Victor, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and other monastics cherished the image of the bride and often defined mystical experience as the soul’s consummation of her marriage to Christ.1 The English Protest¬ ants who developed a distinctively Puritan piety in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries relied on this richly developed theme of espousal in constructing their ideas of sainthood and church life. But even as their piety was shaped by this received tradition of imagining grace as an eager bride and the church as a devoted wife, Puritans redefined the implications of this tradition by interpreting it in the context of domestic life.
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