"Love Raptures": Marital, Romantic, and Erotic Images of Jesus Christ in Puritan New England, 1670-1730

Abstract

ON 19 October 1717, Samuel Sewall's first wife, Hannah Hull, died at the age of fifty-nine. God, Sewall wrote in his diary, would now teach him new lesson; to live a widower's life. By February 1718, though, Sewall was already contemplating another loving union. The prospective spouse about whom he enthused in his diary was not, however, one of the Bostonian widows before whom he would later lay his suit.