Norman Fiering Research Articles

Puritans and Pilgrims

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...

Advertising the Domestic: Anne Bradstreet's Sentimental Poetics

In 1650, New England Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet published her first book of poetry, Tenth Muse, under mysterious circumstances. Accord ing to her, verses had been taken and published without her knowledge or consent, and resulting volume embarrassed her. She calls it, in The Author to Her Book, ill-formed and in need of revision (1). In 1678, six years after her death, a second edition appeared with thirteen additional poems. These new verses turned revised edition, titled Several Poems, from political, theological, and historical themes to lyrics about home. With publication of such poems, Bradstreet raised putatively private experiences to level of public consciousness and, in process, reimagined public community through a domestic lens. This move, I argue, meant that poet achieved many of same goals__in many of same ways__as did nineteenth-century authors of sentimental fiction.(1) Reading Bradstreet's poetry as sentimental opens it to new insights and expands our understanding of American literary history. To describe her works as sentimental (or even proto-sentimental) is, of course, anachronistic;(2) yet in doing so, I build on recent scholarship that traces history of to seventeenth century. Laura Stevens, for example, argues that English missionary writings, beginning with those of Puritans, anticipated many of ideas and gestures that would constitute culture of sensibility (6), and Matthew Brown focuses on the sentimental portrait of Amerindians in his chapter on Eliot Tracts, a series of pamphlets about Puritan missionary activities published between 1643 and 1671 (188). Michelle Burnham, following Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, ties Mary Rowlandson's Puritan captivity narrative of 1682 to rise of sentimentalism, while Norman Fiering's history of moral philosophy argues more generally for inner affinity between and Puritan religious (5). In adding to work of these scholars, I do not wish to conflate Puritan poetry with sentimental novels but rather to illuminate further anticipatlions] and affinit[ies]. Burnham, for example, links Rowlandson to not through an overt staging of critique but by putting material for such critical positions into (26). Likewise, Fiering pursues his work by searching seventeenth-century moral thought for evidence of inchoate sentimentalism (5). In much same way, I find in Bradstreet's Several Poems evidence of inchoate sentimentalism: circulation of sentimental material that would take new form and gain greater cultural power in coming centuries.(3) Like many women writers in nineteenth century, Bradstreet used print to publicize supposedly private experiences of a woman. Moreover, her poetic scenes shaped public arena in which they appeared: Rather than allow state to oversee and govern domestic, she used domestic to comment on status of state. Her poetry thus offers an early example of a woman strategically employing publicly sanctioned private roles to engage in cultural politics. Such activities emerge most clearly if we approach her work as proto-sentimental, one possible opening in development of a long sentimental tradition. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIVES In seventeenth century, terms public and private did a great deal of ideological work, distinguishing levels of visibility, vocations, spaces, and gender roles. variety of meanings and sanctions attached to them can be illustrated through a brief examination of writings of influential English Puritans William Perkins and William Ames, divines who were read widely by American Puritans throughout seventeenth century. Perkins wrote most important preaching manual used by Puritan ministers (Gordis 15-16), and he was still known by Jonathan Edwards in eighteenth century as [t] he famous Mr. …

Portuguese oceanic expansion, 1400-1800

Preface Norman Fiering Introduction Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto translated by Neil Safier Part I. Economics and Society: 1. The economy of the Portuguese Empire Stuart Schwartz 2. Costs and financial trends in the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1822 Jorge Pedreira 3. Markets and merchant communities in the Indian Ocean M. N. Pearson 4. The economic network of Portugal's Atlantic world Luis Felipe de Alencastro translated by Marguerite I. Harrison 5. The Portuguese in Africa John Thornton Part II. Politics and Institutions: 6. Patterns of settlement in the Portuguese Empire John Russell-Wood 7. Political configurations and local powers Francisco Bethencourt 8. Ecclesiastical structures and religious action Isabel dos Guimaraes Sa Part III. The Cultural World: 9. Encounters, negotiations, and interactions Anthony Disney 10. Portuguese imperial and colonial culture Diogo Ramada Curto 11. Language and literature in the Portuguese Empire Luis Moura Sobral 12. Science and technology in Portuguese navigation: an essay on the idea of experience in the sixteenth century Francisco C. Domingues translated by Neil Safier Part IV. The Comparative Dimension: 13. Portuguese expansion in a global context Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.

INTERVIEW WITH NORMAN FIERING

Norman Fiering has announced his retirement as director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library after twenty-two years of service. He has been head of the library, an independently funded and administered research institution located at Brown University, since 1983. During his tenure, the library doubled the size of its building, increased its endowment sevenfold, and established an international research fellowship program that gives awards to as many as thirty scholars a year. More than 5,000 rare books in a dozen different languages have been added to the collection since 1983, all primary sources for the study of the . . .

‘Tremendous Satisfaction from Helping People to Pursue Their Research’: An Interview with Norman Fiering

Wednesday, April 14, 2004, a rainy afternoon in Providence, the city with quaint old houses, as H.P. Lovecraft put it. Inside the century-old building of The John Carter Brown Library, located on the thoroughly soaked Brown Green, a ceremony is conducted in the MacMillan Reading Room. The Ambassador of Spain to the United States, HE. Javier Ruperéz, has just been presented with the first volume of the Hakluyt Society edition of the Malaspina Expedition. After remarking on the importance of this publication, the ambassador turns his attention to the Director of the John Carter Brown Library, Dr Norman Fiering. In recognition of the services of the Library to the promotion of the culture and history of both Spain and the former Spanish colonies, Norman is appointed Commander in the Orden de Isabel la Católica.

The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800. Edited by Paola Bernardini and Norman Fiering. European Expansion and Global Interaction 2. New York: Berghahn, 2001. xxii + 567 pp. $49.95 cloth.

The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800. Edited by Paola Bernardini and Norman Fiering. European Expansion and Global Interaction 2. New York: Berghahn, 2001. xxii + 567 pp. $49.95 cloth.

Norman Fiering and the Revision of Perry Miller

During the century after 1650 the theoretical foundations of Western moral philosophy underwent an extraordinary revolution. By the mid-1600s the skeptical and empirical mentality associated with the revolution in science and the demise of Scholasticism was beginning to undermine the traditional authority of religion and to provoke a sense of impending crisis in moral philosophy. In response there occurred a remarkable outburst of innovative speculation designed to resecure the ethical values of Christian civilization upon new secular moorings. Accepting the premises of the new critical outlook, many thinkers turned away from supernatural Christianity to formulate moral philosophies whose foundations were naturalistic. They took a number of tacks, but the foremost trend, exemplified by the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, sought to embed moral behavior in man's supposed sentiment of benevolence. The rise of this "new moral philosophy" of "benevolism" is the subject of Norman Fiering's Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard.1

Norman Fiering. Jonathan Edward's Moral Thought and Its British Context. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.)

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Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and its British Context. By Norman Fiering. Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Pp. 391. No price given.

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Book Notices

Book Notices Get access Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context. By Norman Fiering. University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 391 pages. $24.00. Daniel Walker Howe Daniel Walker Howe University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 52, Issue 2, June 1984, Pages 381-b–382, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/52.2.381-b Published: 01 June 1984

Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context. By Norman Fiering. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. xiii + 391 pp. $30.00.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition. By Norman Fiering. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. xi + 323 pp. $24.00.

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Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context by Norman Fiering

Book Review| April 01 1983 Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context by Norman Fiering Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context. By Fiering, Norman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Pp. xiii, 391. $30.00. Winton U. Solberg Winton U. Solberg University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1983) 82 (2): 230–231. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-82-2-230 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Winton U. Solberg; Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context by Norman Fiering. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 1983; 82 (2): 230–231. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-82-2-230 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1983 by Duke University Press1983 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Jonathan Edwards's Religious Psychology

Jonathan Edwards scholarship, thriving since late 1940s when Perry Miller wrote his influential book on great thinker, has flourished even more than usual in recent years with significant new books by Wallace E. Anderson, Norman Fiering, Terrence Erdt, and Patricia J. Tracy. 1 Though much of this recent work surpasses Miller, one is grateful for 1981 reprinting of his Jonathan Edwards (1949), which, as it fades from influence among colonial historians, remains an interesting document of twentieth-century culture because of Miller's use of Edwards to attack modern American liberals. To so use Edwards, Miller had to render him palatable to modern readers and rescue him from liberals' image of an inhuman preacher of fiery hell. His strategy both to put Edwards at odds with his contemporaries and to bring him closer to us by arguing that his preaching was America's sudden leap into modernity. A courageous man of existential angst, Miller's Edwards accepted loneliness of human beings in a cold, inhuman universe. source of Edwards's modern sensibility his youthful readingthe central and decisive event in his intellectual life '-of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Miller, accepting Sereno Dwight's mistaken dating, believed that at fourteen Edwards realized that English empiricist the master-spirit of age and promptly wrote his brilliant notes on The Mind, which firmly followed Locke's sensational psychology. It only to be expected that backwoods prodigy later described religious experience according to a strictly empirical model, reducing even divine grace, Miller thought, to status of a sense perception. In Edwards's outwardly tragic life Miller found a nice morality play of tough-minded thinker out of step with his prosperous and complacent society; voted out of Northampton pulpit,

Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context

Journal Article Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context. By Norman Fiering. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. xiii + 391 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliographical note, and index. $30.00.) Get access David Levin David Levin University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 69, Issue 3, December 1982, Page 685, https://doi.org/10.2307/1903159 Published: 01 December 1982

Norman Fiering. <italic>Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context</italic>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1981. Pp. xiii, 391. $30.00

Journal Article Norman Fiering. Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1981. Pp. xiii, 391. $30.00 Get access Fiering Norman. Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1981. Pp. xiii, 391. $30.00. Richard Schlatter Richard Schlatter Rutgers University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 87, Issue 4, October 1982, Pages 1152–1153, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/87.4.1152-a Published: 01 October 1982

Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and its British Context (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1981, $30). Pp. xiii, 391.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Norman Fiering. <italic>Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition</italic>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1981. Pp. x, 323. $24.00

Journal Article Norman Fiering. Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1981. Pp. x, 323. $24.00 Get access Fiering Norman. Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1981. Pp. x, 323. $24.00. Edwin S. Gaustad Edwin S. Gaustad University of California, Riverside Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 87, Issue 2, April 1982, Pages 528–529, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/87.2.528 Published: 01 April 1982

How Ethics Was Transformed at Harvard

Book reviewed in this article: Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth Century Harvard. By Norman Fiering.

RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA

Journal Article RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA Get access Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard A Discipline in Transition By Norman Fiering University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Wilhamsburg, Virginia, 1981 323 pages $24 00 Daniel Walker Howe Daniel Walker Howe University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume L, Issue 4, December 1982, Pages 627-b–628, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/L.4.627-b Published: 01 December 1982