Puritan Theology Research Articles

Has Capitalism Lost its Puritan Spirit? What do Recent WVS Data Say about Religiosity and Work Values?

IntroductionIt is well established that the industrial and post™ industrial transformations have profoundly altered how humans think, work, and live. The emergence of knowledge-based post™ industrial societies has accelerated the cultural change not only in rich and developed countries but also throughout the world (Bell, 1973, Turkle, 1995, Toffler, 1989) . Sociologists such as Daniel Bell (1976), John Carroll (1977), Christopher Lasch (1979), Zygmunt Bauman (1987, 1999) and Richard Sennett (1998) etc., claimed that capitalism has lost its puritan spirit during the post™ industrial era.This paper is about the cultural shift from the puritan to a secular spirit of late capitalism, which has been defined under different names by social theorists. The issue of or the epoch of new age has become one the central topics of social theory. In the transformation process from an agricultural/traditional society to an industrial society, the ethos of society has changed. Modern/industrial capitalism has created a or the has created the new society.The Puritan work belongs to modern times in human history coinciding with the industrial revolution. ^Vork had never been a virtue or a way of salvation before the industrial age. According to the Oxford Online Etymology Dictionary, labor, the synonym of work, means trouble, difficulty, hardship, toil, fatigue, exertion and pain at the same time. For example, the ancient Greeks and Romans considered work to be a curse and fit only for slaves (Kaplan, 1979; Ciulla, 2000). The ancient philosophers had a consensus about the abhorrence of work. Plato and Aristotle believed that work (for commercial gain) humiliated the people who performed it (Lafargue, 1907).However, with the coming of an industrial society, schools, industrial organizations and religious associations started to preach the virtue of hard work and the well-organized use of time (Polanyi, 1957; Kaplan, 1979; Bozkurt et al., 2010). The Ford Company founded the Sociological Department to examine the private life of workers. Researchers from this section visited workers' homes and encouraged workers to aspire to the Ford values of industriousness, thrift, sobriety, saving, and hygiene. Ford tried to reduce absenteeism and the turnover of workers. Moreover, the Sociological Department endeavored to enforce puritan morality (McGraw, 2007; Lasch, 1979; Clegg, 2009).According to Weber (1971, 1956) occidental industrial capitalism, which is the rational organization of free labor, is unique and has not existed elsewhere. The ethos of this capitalism was ethic codes that emphasized the importance of the values of work, anti-leisure, saving, abstinence, moral orientation, frugality, sobriety, industriousness, achievement, moderation, sexual restraint, tranquility, temperance, silence, order, resolution, sincerity, justice, cleanliness, chastity, humility, and forbidding (Bell, 1976; Furnham, 1990). For Weber, the Puritan ethic, which was a rationalization of life and economic action, justified all the restraints and sanctions for individual life and advanced the development of capitalism. Early industrial capitalism also desperately required the puritan mood and values. One major outcome of restraints on consumption was the accumulation of capital, which in turn led to the expansion of production and further development (Bell, 1996).In another important study, Carroll (1977) demonstrated how Puritan theology helped liberate individuals from the ties of the traditional values of pre-industrial societies. This was crucial for it emphasized man's general responsibility and the passionate early Puritans played an important role in the shaping of industrial society. These values expanded religion beyond the borders of the church and made it of this world. Vocation in Protestant theology was considered a sublimation of guilt and man was also considered a sinner at birth. …

Resisting the Devil: The Case of Edward Dynham (1626) and Options for English Protestant Dispossession

ABSTRACTTo the displeasure of many puritans, the Church of England canons of 1604 restricted the casting out of Devils to prayer and fasting. Yet after that date not all possession cases disappeared, nor were all dismissed as false. This article explores ways that long-standing general Protestant as well as puritan theology and practices (especially related to ‘resisting the Devil’) informed post-1604 anti-demonic activity. With a clear biblical basis, and primarily as an individual rather than collective practice, resisting the Devil was embraced by people from a wide range of religious positions and remained unrestricted by the religious establishment. There was variation; not everyone approved of how resisting the Devil was applied in particular cases. Yet ample evidence suggests that dispossessions led by lay people, and by means other than prayer and fasting, did in fact have a place within (and influenced the development of) Protestantism in early-modern England.

Church, State, and Commonwealth: The Transatlantic Puritan Movement in England and America

Church, State, and Commonwealth:The Transatlantic Puritan Movement in England and America Neal T. Dugre Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds. By Francis J. Bremer. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012. 436 pages. Cloth. Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England. By Abram C. Van Engen. Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 325 pages. Cloth, ebook. Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill. By Michael P. Winship. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. 350 pages. Cloth. Like most puritan divines, the Reverend John Davenport spent a good deal of his adult life explaining the subtleties of his beliefs. These conversations were often informal, but some, including his Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design is Religion, found their way into print. Davenport wrote the Discourse around 1638 or 1639 in response to an unnamed correspondent who wondered "Whether the Right and Power of Chusing Civil Magistrates belongs unto the Church of Christ?"1 In the late 1630s, the answer to that question was of great interest to English audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Puritans in Massachusetts Bay had recently embraced their own brand of congregationalism and adopted a radical form of civil government that entangled ecclesiastical and civil polities by restricting the franchise to male church members, moves that attracted intense scrutiny in England. Over twenty-four pages, Davenport expounded on his views of civil polities and their relationship to the church. Yet before delving into his intricate, six-part argument, he critiqued the inquiry itself. The wording of the [End Page 344] question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. It assumed that ecclesiastical and civil polities together constituted the basic elements of society, but the real foundation was something else entirely: "Christian Communion." In Davenport's taxonomy, "Christian Communion" was the "Genus" of society, and ecclesiastical and civil polities its "Species."2 Although church and state each had different objectives, they shared the goal of promoting the common welfare, of nurturing Christian Communion. Perhaps we too have been asking the wrong questions. Twenty-five years ago, historian David D. Hall bemoaned how out of touch the "half-truths" scholars tell about puritanism in seventeenth-century New England were with recent scholarship.3 Despite a steady stream of monographs published in the intervening decades, historians and literary scholars still grapple with that disconnect. Both Abram C. Van Engen and Francis J. Bremer, for example, promote their studies in part as rebuttals to the tenacious half-truth of stern and unfeeling puritans. All three of the books under review advance a recent revival in puritan studies that is beginning to close this gap. Examining institutions, intangible feelings, and the lived experiences that knit puritans in England and America together, the authors take puritan theology and the intricate bonds between New England's ecclesiastical and civil polities seriously. In recovering the face-to-face interactions and dialogues between individuals from various points on the spectrum of puritan orthodoxy, the authors suggest how puritans moved toward the larger goal of fostering Christian Communion by negotiating relationships among themselves. In Godly Republicanism, Michael P. Winship returns to the beginnings of the puritan movement following the ascension of Queen Elizabeth I and the restoration of Protestantism to England. Described as a "study in applied sacred political theory" (4), the book examines the republican foundations of church and state in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Winship builds on recent English scholarship that locates the roots of republicanism not in the mid-seventeenth century but in Tudor and early Stuart England. Religion has not factored prominently in that historiography, but Winship brings to light "assumptions and webs of concern" (5) that linked puritanism to secular political ideals that we recognize as republicanism. Godly ecclesiastical republicanism and secular republicanism shared common "priorities and anxieties," namely "the dread of the corrupting effects of power, the fear of one-man rule, the emphasis on the consent of the people and on balanced government" (5). Throughout, Winship highlights the surprising and significant [End Page 345] ways that separatists, "black sheep" (7) among puritans and their historians, interacted with radical...

Thomas Aquinas and John Owen on the beatific vision: A Reply to Suzanne McDonald

AbstractIt has been shown that the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, St Thomas Aquinas, was an important theological influence on John Owen, the seventeenth-century English puritan theologian, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, especially in the areas of the divine being, grace and Chalcedonian Christology. Suzanne McDonald has argued that, while Aquinas is unmistakably a source for Owen's doctrine of the beatific vision, Owen surpassed Aquinas's doctrine in a manner she judges to be correct, theologically speaking, and which exposes the deficiency of Aquinas's account. Owen achieved this particular ‘Reforming’ or rather ‘re-forming’ of Aquinas's doctrine, she argues, by way of a ‘Christological re-orientation of the doctrine’ in terms of what is seen in the beatific vision and how it is seen, that is, its content and means. This article replies to McDonald from a Catholic and Thomist perspective, in response to her suggestion that Owen's account of the beatific vision opens up possibilities for ecumenical dialogue. The article attempts to achieve this first by reassessing the Christological contrasts McDonald draws between Owen and Aquinas in terms of content and means, and then by offering several suggestions as to why one might want to prefer Aquinas's account over Owen's.

The Economics of Conversion and Salvation: An Examination of Puritanism’s Halfway Covenant

Why would Colonial America’s Puritan theologians introduce a product differentiation-related doctrinal change—the Halfway Covenant—that would lower the price of eternal salvation to many of its potential congregants (believers)? Following Hébert, Tollison, and Mixon, this study argues that the Halfway Covenant can be viewed, at least in part, as a market response by Puritan theologians to doctrinal competition—one that would increase Puritan church membership and attendance. Among the church’s competitors were Quakers and Baptists, and vocal critics within the church, such as Anne Hutchinson. Secondary competition to church doctrine was represented by so-called counter-magic, or good magic, particularly during episodes of witchcraft hysteria.

Moderation and religious criticism in William Cartwright’s The Ordinary (1635)

ABSTRACTBuilding on the recent revival of critical interest in the drama of William Cartwright, this article explores the politics of religious moderation in his 1635 play The Ordinary. I situate the concept of moderation in Caroline England in relation to recent historical work on the subject, examining how Cartwright treats the subject in his poetry, where he argues that religious extremism inhibits the proper articulation of moderate politics. I then consider religious criticism in The Ordinary, suggesting that it attacks aspects of Puritan and Arminian theology alike. Although he ranges over a number of topics, Cartwright is particularly concerned with the way in which religious innovation is undermined by economic unfairness, incompetence, and greed. The play shows how Caroline comedy engages with polemical culture in subtle and sophisticated ways.

Gewissen und Gerechtigkeit in den Beichtbüchern der Frühen Neuzeit

Abstract “Conscience” was a main issue in the Catholic theology of the XVI century and it played an important part in the speculative theology of the great commentaries on the Summa theologiae, where it was treated as the epistemological problem of the synderesis. But it also dominated the literature of the Summulae confessorum, which was intended to solve problems of practical life. These writings could rely on a quite long and very rich tradition, which had given in the XV century a systematic shape to all questions pertaining to the different fora competent for the sins of the Christian. The main feature of this doctrine was that the church had to administrate both the forum internum and the forum externum, which was intended as a part of the ecclesiastic jurisdiction. The same pattern was adopted since the late XVI century by both Lutheran and Calvinistic or Puritan theology, of course with an important difference, because the sacramental mediation of the church in the process of the confession was progressively dismissed completely. In this way, the difference between the forum internum and the forum externum was developed to such a point that the former corresponded only with the singular conscience and the latter coincided only with the law of a sovereign power.

Book Review: Living Justification: A Historical-Theological Study of the Reformed Doctrine of Justification in the Writings of John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and N.T. Wright

Living Justification: A Historical-Theological Study of the Reformed Doctrine of Justification in the Writings ofJohn Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and N.T. Wright. By Jonathan R. Huggins. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2013. vii + 236 pp. $27.00 (paper).In Living Justification, Jonathan Huggins considers the writings of Jonathan Edwards and N. T. Wright, who stand in one way or another in the reformed or Calvinist tradition, as they receive and re-express that tradition's central doctrine. Huggins writes clearly and argues well, though the book is clearly born of a dissertation at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.Huggins cites at one point Alister McGraths distinction between justification as a biblical concept and as a doctrine. With respect to the latter he traces the debates, and sometimes the inconsistencies, of his authors. Is it based on forgiveness or on imputation? Is the latter based on Christ's active or passive obedience? Where does union with Christ fit in? And, when we get around to Wright, what about the bestowal of a new identity based on covenant faithfulness? The non-specialist might well respond that these terms are all related to one another. This in turn leads us back to the commonalities to be found in the theological concept.In the idiom of ?Tale theology, what, I would ask, is the grammar that binds divergent Reformation thinkers in different places and times together? Surely Huggins's treatment of tradition in the conclusion implies just this question. One stab at an answer might look like this: each root metaphor expresses or implies substitution (Christ for us), prevenience (God acting while we were yet sinners), and sufficiency (to the divine Yes nothing need be added). To this list might be added, according to a more modern idiom, the eschatological: God pronounces now, for Christ's sake, what God shall say about us at the Great Assize. Alternately, Huggins's book offers another meta-account: in the chapter on Edwards, Huggins shows how, for the great Puritan theologian, sola fide, solo Christo, and sola gratia mutually interpret and imply one another. My point is that these are attempts to say what needs to be preserved in the concept, though preferences of idiom change. They are but two answers to the question of how doctrinal consistency works in a tradition.This book clearly means to find its climax in the section on Wright, and more specifically to show that his renewed attention to scripture, his willingness to seek a new idiom, and his emphasis on a new identity bestowed on the Gentiles are not opposed to the reformed stream, but are truly reformed. …

‘Is Smyth also Among the Brownists?’ A Confrontation Between John Smyth and His Predecessor Robert Browne

In recent literature John Smyth is thought to be in lineage with Separatist pioneer Robert Browne, two decades earlier. However when considering their ecclesiology, and especially their theology of ministry, huge differences emerge. This article will challenge the present thesis and show how Smyth not only broke away from the Church of England, as did Browne, but also broke away from Puritan theology and developed a more spiritualistic approach to the church gathering, its ministry and the role of Scripture. Browne, on the contrary, never abandoned his Puritan roots and kept a firm emphasis on the special character of church ministry, distinctly called and sent by Christ to serve the church as his messenger.

The tyranny of immaterialism: Refusing the body in The Winter’s Tale

The aim of this study is to analyse the way Shakespeare’s work reveals the failure – in both private and public lives – of a system of thought in which the body is construed as a mere receptacle of immaterial and “superior” entities, supposedly governed by rational kinds of political and social power. After a brief consideration of Measure for Measure as a play focused on the political danger of denying the material aspect of the individual, The Winter’s Tale will be seen as presenting a similar problem. Here, the aspiration to an ideal of absolute purity and the consequent demonization of the sexualized flesh, deriving from both Puritan theology and neo-Platonic philosophy, merges with the anxiety towards the “rebellious” body fostered by sixteenth century medical science, constituting the disruptive force that initiates the plot. This attitude of denial of the body, linked to political power, leads to both a psychological breakdown and, in the public sphere, to a regime of tyranny.

“The Practice of Conveying and Suffering the Small-pox”: Inoculation as a Means of Spiritual Conversion in Cotton Mather’s Angel of Bethesda

“The Practice of Conveying and Suffering the Small-pox”: Inoculation as a Means of Spiritual Conversion in Cotton Mather’s Angel of Bethesda Lucas Hardy (bio) You may see (said they) what hee is by his Diseases! —Cotton Mather, The Diary, 1692 Smallpox arrived for the sixth time in the city of Boston in late April of 1721.1 Reacting to the outbreak in his diary, Cotton Mather—the eminent Puritan theologian and first proponent of inoculation in America—wrote, “The grievous Calamity of the Small-pox has now entered the Town. The practice of conveying and suffering the Small-pox by Inoculation, has never been used in America…But how many lives might be saved by it, if it were practiced? I will procure a Consult of our Physicians, and lay the matter before them.”2 If his first remark about smallpox was an apparently scientific one, Mather’s second comment, which came just two days later, looked entirely ministerial. He noted, again in his diary, “The Entrance of the Smallpox into the Town must awaken in me several Tempers and Actions of Piety relating to myself, besides a Variety of Duty to the People.”3 Throughout the nearly yearlong epidemic, Mather oscillated between his interest in medicine and his deeply-entrenched sense of Protestant ethics to determine the proper course of action in assisting the community with the outbreak. Since the middle of the twentieth century, medical historians have paid special attention to the scientific impact of Mather’s work on inoculation. Otho T. Beall, Jr. and Richard H. Shryock, for instance, in Cotton Mather: First Significant Figure in American Medicine (1954), were the first to show in a book-length study the importance of Mather’s role in the [End Page 61] smallpox epidemic. They asserted that “the history of immunology, with all its ultimate values in overcoming infectious diseases, began…in the Boston of 1721.”4 Three decades later, Arthur M. Silverstein, in A History of Immunology (1989), argued that Mather “not only advanced a theory of acquired immunity in natural smallpox infection but also explained…why variolation [or inoculation] is effective in inducing lasting immunity.”5 More recently, Ed Cohen, in A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (2009) has suggested that “the first person to adapt the notion of ‘self-defense’ to a medical context, thereby foreshadowing what we now call immunity, is the most iconic and bombastic of American Protestants, Cotton Mather.”6 While these studies have positioned Mather as a progressive scientist on the verge of discovering concepts that would become theories of contagion and acquired immunity well over a century after the 1721 outbreak, their tendency to follow the scientific legacy of inoculation has overlooked the fact that Mather viewed the procedure chiefly as a method for obtaining resistance to the pathogenic force of innate sin. In this regard, inoculation served as the very “action of piety” and “duty to the people” he mentioned in his diary.7 This essay proves that Mather viewed inoculation not just as a medical procedure but, more accurately, as a new scientific means for inducing spiritual conversion. For the Puritans, the ultimate purpose of conversion was to produce the assurance that God had bestowed saving grace upon the repentant. Early in the twentieth century, Perry Miller explained that this process began within each person by some contact with a conversionary “means.” “Conversion,” Miller writes, “is an event in nature, and as in other natural events, the process of regeneration is initiated by an external object from which the senses derive a phantasm, exactly as in any other act of apprehension.”8 The experience Miller describes began with the convert capturing a sensation, but it quickly became an intellectual operation wherein she sought to interpret the spiritual meaning of both the stimulus and the sensation. Inoculation, then, promoted such a conversion in two specific ways. First, it kindled a weak form of smallpox in the patient and produced symptoms that could be read for signs of healing in both the body and the soul. Second, and of most importance to Cotton Mather, was the idea that it induced a prescribed...

Bozenna Chylińska, The Gospel of Work and Wealth in the Puritan Ethic: From John Calvin to Benjamin Franklin.

In her book Bozenna Chylinska offers an extensive, well-documented, and detailed discussion of the concept of work in Puritan theology and life. Tracing the evolution of the Puritan interpretations of work from the beginnings of the Reformation to the end of the eighteenth century, Chylinska presents the views of English and American Puritans and refers to their biographies as evidence of how work was not just part of religious beliefs, but also lived experience of such Puritan thinkers as Jo...

Invisible Hebrews: Jews in Early America

Invisible Hebrews:Jews in Early America Jennifer Glaser (bio) New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America. Michael Hoberman. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. 296 pp. Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life. Laura Leibman. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012. 416 pp. Black Jews in Africa and the Americas. Tudor Parfitt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. 240 pp. Early in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, Tudor Parfitt relates an anecdote about the false prophet Richard Brothers, a British man who "was convinced initially that the Second Coming would be in 1795, when he would be revealed as Prince of the Hebrews and would lead the Jews back to Palestine along with the 'invisible Hebrews,' the descendants of the Lost Tribes, many of whom lived in England and other (Protestant) parts of northern Europe" (41). Parfitt shares this episode in order to support his argument—one of many in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas—that some "British Protestants [thought they] themselves were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel" (41). The so-called "British Israel" theory, he contends, had a vast effect on colonial projects in Africa and the Americas. While Parfitt and Brothers use the term to allude to the secret Jews (metaphorical kin to the conversos) in their midst, I borrow the suggestive and multivalent idea of "invisible Hebrews" for a related, but slightly different [End Page 201] purpose: to mark the many ways in which Jews were both invisible in and fundamental to early American culture. Like the "invisible Hebrews" in Parfitt's anecdote, Jews in the Americas were not always easy to find, their numbers remaining small throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet they managed to be omnipresent—in Puritan theology and legal theory, transatlantic trade, and in the discourses surrounding otherness, estrangement, and indigeneity in the Atlantic world. This dialectic of Jewish visibility and invisibility haunts the narratives of three recent books that treat the complex world of Jews in early America: Parfitt's aforementioned comparative work on blacks and Jews in Africa and the Americas; Michael Hoberman's New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America; and Laura Arnold Leibman's Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life, recent winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Each of these scholars employs a distinct methodology and a different definition of "America"; however, all three benefit greatly from renewed interest in the figuration of difference and otherness in an early American context, as well as from recent theorizations of what some scholars have called "the Jewish Atlantic." The Jewish presence has always had a spectral role in Atlantic studies. Paul Gilroy opens his germinal work on the black Atlantic by invoking the history of the Jewish diaspora as an always already transnational one with structural parallels to the global history of African dispossession. Nonetheless, despite (or perhaps because of) this inherently transnational character, many scholars have cleaved to national paradigms. As Adam Sutcliffe points out in his important essay on "Jewish History in an Age of Atlanticism," the Jewish encounter with modernity "was marked by a widespread concern among Jews, in response to the implicit quid pro quo of Emancipation, to demonstrate that they saw themselves above all not as a part of a transnational ethno-religious body but as loyal citizens of the states in which they lived" (18). The impetus to demonstrate fealty to the state "has left deep historiographical traces: a nation-by-nation approach has dominated the study of the Jewish past, with a tendency, in comparative work, to posit a hierarchy of advancement in different national communities, with German Jewry generally blazing the trail followed later and more hesitantly by others" (18). Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in moving beyond this nation-centered approach. The study of early modern Jewry, in particular, has begun to complicate [End Page 202] the field's formerly largely Ashkenazic, nation-based emphasis, especially as scholars who focus on the Mediterranean gain a voice in Jewish literary and cultural studies. Scholars of "the Jewish Atlantic" have borrowed a number of terms from studies of the early...

Looking for Stories of Inarticulate Women

Most women of the past were not writers. Most produced few, if any, texts in the conventional sense of the term. Some of these women lived in predominantly oral cultures in which neither men nor women engaged in textual production. Some lived in literate cultures but were excluded from this elite expression of agency by male control of the educational system. Many were never taught to read and write. Others were taught to read but not to write. In colonial New England, for example, literacy levels for both men and women were high because all persons, irrespective of gender, were encouraged to read the Bible for themselves. Nevertheless, the distinction between reading literacy and writing literacy reinforced women's subordinate status. Because they could fulfill their duties as both Christians and goodwives without writing, such education was considered superfluous, especially for women in lower socioeconomic statuses (Hall 32). But even women who could write apparently did not do much of it, or if they did, the sorts of texts they produced were less likely to survive over time, to become objects of historical and literary interest. First-person writings such as diaries and letters--the gold standard for scholarly research--are rare; poems, novels, and nonfiction writings are even more so. The fact that many women who once lived rich, articulate lives are now silent creates both an impediment and a dilemma for scholars. It limits whom we can study and what we can know about their lives. All who study women of the past have confronted these limits and experienced in some measure the frustrations they create. If we confine ourselves to those women whose voices have survived, we rule out most women. If we are not satisfied working within these boundaries, how do we access the lives of voiceless, or textless, women? One fruitful approach has been to study the lives of women in the aggregate, which has produced important composite portraits of the normative roles for women who lived in past times. But because these constructions may not accurately represent the lived experience of any one particular woman--whose life undoubtedly differed from the norm in various ways--the inarticulateness of women from the past becomes a much greater impediment in the particular. And it is the study of particular women that I want to focus on. Some years ago I found my attention drawn to one particular woman from the past. In 2012, I published a reconstruction of this woman's life, a project that brought home to me the challenges inherent in recovering the lives of early American women. My subject's name was Elizabeth Tuttle. (1) In many ways Tuttle was an ordinary colonial woman. She was born in New Haven in 1645. After her marriage to Richard Edwards, in 1667, she moved to Hartford, where her husband's family lived. Over the next twenty years she gave birth to the expected succession of children. Two additional facts, however, distinguish her from a typical goodwife. The first is that her marriage ended in divorce, and the second is that she is the paternal grandmother of the great Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. In combination, these two facts have perpetuated a particular image of Elizabeth Tuttle as Edwards's crazy grandmother. Modern biographers of Edwards have routinely depicted Tuttle as a rebellious woman who by her mad threats and promiscuous behavior drove her long-suffering husband to petition for divorce. George M. Marsden, for example, describes her as an incorrigible profligate who was afflicted with a serious psychosis characterized by repeated infidelities and fits of perversity (22). To complicate this neatly gendered distribution of praise and blame we need to hear Tuttle's side of the story. But like most women of the past, she is silent. My curiosity about this story and this representation of Elizabeth Tuttle forced me to address directly the dilemma of how to access the life of one particular inarticulate woman. …

Calvin and his puritan heirs on Christ’s humanity in Hebrews

John Calvin was a highly influential second-generation Reformer whose commentaries on most of the books of the Bible shaped the theology and piety of Reformed churches in successive centuries. In his commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, Calvin sets forth a Christology that often focuses on how Christ’s humanity has practical benefits for the Christian believer. With that in mind, however, his comments on Christ’s humanity lack the sophistication found in the writings of several noted Puritan theologians, such as John Owen, Tomas Goodwin, and Stephen Charnock. These Puritan theologians address questions that Calvin was either apparently unwilling to entertain in any detail or unable to give the type of rigorous analysis that we find among his Post-reformation heirs. This article will demonstrate that Calvin’s Christology paves the way for more intricate discussions of the person of Christ, and for this reason scholars should acknowledge that later Reformed theologians did not in fact jettison the so-called “Christocentricity” of Calvin, but in fact developed his Christology in ways that were more positive in order to meet the needs of emerging heresies as well as foster a more robust Christian spirituality that focuses on the benefits of Christ’s human nature for the Christian believer.

MICHAEL HOBERMAN. New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America.

The merits of Michael Hoberman's book depend upon the expectation of the reader. Those looking for substantial insight into Puritanism or Reformed Hebraism as theological or social movements will likely be disappointed. Those looking for a narrative about the interaction of particular Puritan leaders with Jews in New England will likely be pleased. When Hoberman attempts insight into Puritan theology or culture itself (as is especially the case in chapter one), weaknesses become apparent. When Hoberman uses primary sources to explore the relationships of famous Puritans and Jews, he is on firmer ground. Hoberman is not trying simply to retell the stories of prominent Jews in New England. He rightly acknowledges that other historians have already told those stories. Instead, Hoberman hopes to demonstrate that Jews had a “centralizing influence” upon Puritan theology and identity (p. 3). This reviewer was not persuaded that Hoberman's study had the scope necessary to provide insight into something so unwieldy as Puritan theology and identity. His command of Puritan social thought lacks confidence and insight and is largely dependent on the summaries and interpretations of others. But if one restricts Hoberman's ambition to the theological opinions of particular Puritans such as Cotton Mather or Ezra Stiles (two prominent case studies in his book), his study is more persuasive and his narrative more valuable.

The effect of the universities of the Low Countries on the intellectual history of Hungary in the early modern times

In the previous research, two periods were distinguished in the history of the intellectual connections between the Low Countries and Hungary in the early modern age. The first period, terminating at the beginning of the 17th century, was characterized with the impact of Renaissance Humanism, while in the second one, lasting from the 1620s to the end of the century, Cartesian philosophy and Puritan theology were mentioned among the effects reaching Hungary. This paper deals with the traces of the intellectual and literary history of Hungary and Transylvania that can be connected to the extensive philological scholarship practiced at the universities of the Netherlands. The Hungarian crowd of students invading the university of Leiden from the end of the 1610s — the university which was in the contemporary frontline of philological reflection and was also exceptional in the field of philological practice — faced the consequences of philological conceptions, especially of those permeated from Latin Humanism...

WHAT AN COLLINS WAS READING

An Collins' 1653 collection of poems, Divine Songs and Meditacions, contains all that we know about the writer. But in these poems, she tells us much about the books that she had read, and about her indebtedness to the catechetical works of the Elizabethan Puritan theologian William Perkins in particular. By varying the degree to which her source texts are visible, Collins also tells us about her political affiliations. We can now place her among the Presbyterians of the 1650s. The method of reading outlined here, attending to the relative visibility of source texts being quoted and paraphrased, will be of use to scholars investigating formulaic genres like meditations and prayers—genres in which women writers were particularly active in the early modern period.

The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (review)

Reviewed by: The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England Susan Scott Parrish (bio) The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England. Sarah Rivett. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 400 pp. If you are like me, it probably escaped your notice that René Descartes's Discourse on Method and Anne Hutchinson's "immediate revelation" appeared in the same year: 1637. Not so Sarah Rivett, who has written a learned and convincing account, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England, explaining why figures typically separated into the "reason" or "faith" camps were instead fellow respondents to the shared, postlapsarian condition of epistemological uncertainty. In this characteristic critical moment, Rivett sees Descartes and Hutchinson as "two sides of the same coin, for Descartes affirms certainty of God's existence by separating it from human reason" (232). Whereas it is in Descartes's cogito that scholars typically locate the origin of a modern bifurcation within the human cognitive stance toward material and immaterial worlds, Rivett shows how Descartes continued, like Hutchinson, to trust in "revealed truths" (233). Broadly described, Rivett has written a book about "those who wished to salvage reason and empiricism as avenues for the study of God" (239). Descartes is just one of many European authors, typically placed in a history of Enlightenment science trajectory, whom Rivett reads as equally invested in a science of the soul. Another key example is that of Francis Bacon, whose Advancement of Learning (1605), a text many scholars see as inaugurating modern empiricism, was published just two years after he wrote a short pamphlet entitled The Confession of Faith. Rivett is by no means the first scholar to draw attention to the very Christian, and at times millenarian, orientation of seventeenth-century natural philosophers (the religiosity in particular of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton has received much attention), but I would say that she is the first scholar to investigate [End Page 705] the intricate and sustained Atlantic conversation through which an early modern science of the soul was essayed. In this capacity, Rivett's real contribution comes in the chapters in which—after setting the English and Continental stage—Rivett traces the particular evidentiary status colonial locales held for practicing and refining this science. As the avant-garde of radical English Protestantism in the 1630s, Massachusetts became an active "laboratory of grace" (131) as colonists there pursued a vision of corporate sainthood. Rivett shows how various Puritan theologians adapted both Calvin and Bacon to observe the secret workings of divinity not only in themselves as individuals but also in the collective through communal acts of spiritual detection and narration. She then explores the establishment of a gendered line between male and female public confession in this period. In New England, Rivett argues, as opposed to England and Ireland, men in public confessions performed a "self-discovering 'I'" whereas women tended to testify to unknowing, to the more fallen side of the Adamic predicament. What was an inherent tension within Calvinism between certainty and uncertainty became, in New England, a gendered distinction. Rivett next turns to Indian conversion accounts and dictionaries to argue that transcribed Indian languages (Algonquin in this case) came to be studied as a key to unlocking a pre-Babel universal "character" rather than being held up as a sign of epistemological defect as would be the case in a typical translatio imperii narrative. Rivett, turning toward the late seventeenth century, takes up a genre that she terms "tokenography," comprising narratives in which "[m]inisters and laypeople attempted to capture the essence of spiritual plentitude in the moment before death through a written record of divine translation from death to life, from the visible to the invisible world, from the dark glass of limited perception to unfiltered revelation" (178). Tokenography took for its subjects the "weaker earthen vessels," namely dying children, young women, and Indians, and in so doing, shifted a sense of privileged testimonial validity (vis-à--vis the invisible world) to these groups. In the final two chapters—on the Salem witchcraft trials and early eighteenth-century evangelical Christians (especially Jonathan Edwards)—Rivett charts how the rise of mechanical philosophy did not quash...

Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America

Mark Valeri's new book provides a lucid and thorough treatment of an enduring subject: “How did pious New Englanders come to revere the market as it developed in their day?” (p. 3). Valeri's investigation combines a collective biography of four generations of Boston's transatlantic merchants with an intellectual history of Puritan theology and political economy between 1630 and 1730. This approach results in a narrative that is closely woven and broadly transatlantic. Boston's merchants, Valeri argues, remained generally consistent in their faith across the generations, even as they anguished over a changing set of issues relating to the practice of their trade. The teachings they heard from the pulpit, on the other hand, evolved significantly from a world where preachers “asserted a contest between economic mind-sets and biblical charity” to one where “Boston's postpuritan preachers followed the logic of natural philosophy to a nearly complete validation of the market in their day” (pp. 59, 220).