Puritans and Pilgrims

Abstract

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...