Puritan Generations in New England

Abstract

David Levin. Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663-1703. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. 360 + xvi pp. Frank Shuffelton. Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. 325 + xii pp. Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, eds. So Dread/nil a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676- Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. 490 + viii pp. William K. B. Stoever. "A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven": Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. 251 + xi pp. The Antinomian controversy and King Philip's War were the two formative crises of seventeenth-century New England Puritanism: the first intellectual, the second physical. The generation coming to maturity before these troubles is epitomized by Thomas Hooker, the English minister, trained in the Elizabethan church and brought to North America in his middle years. The generation succeeding the events—more complex and less susceptible of easy embodiment in one figure—may nevertheless be fairly represented by the New-England born, Harvard-educated historian and activist Cotton Mather. These four books illuminate from many directions the shifts of purpose and achievement in the Puritan experiment.