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The Puritan Errand Re-Viewed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Andrew Delbanco
Andrew Delbanco
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. An earlier version of this essay, which is part of a forthcoming study of the Puritan migration to New England, was delivered to the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association in December, 1983. The author wishes to thank Professor Lewis P. Simpson, Chair of the Section, for inviting the paper on that occasion, and Professors John Klause, Deborah Epstein Nord, and Albert J. von Frank for their helpful comments on several drafts.
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Extract

In the twenty years since Perry Miller's death there have been many new beginnings in the field he inspired. We have witnessed an impressive recovery of the Puritans' gift for metaphoric adventure, and a number of town and family studies have given us a fuller sense of Puritan life “from the bottom up.” More recently, there have appeared some sensitive explorations of “lay piety,” and of the expressive significance of artifacts, shaped space, dress, gravestones, and the like — “evidence as powerful as any sermon of the deeper values that existed in tension at the core of seventeenth-century New England culture.” Yet despite these advances and the many spirited revisions of Miller's own views on more traditional issues in intellectual history such as the precise nature of “non-separating congregationalism,” the validity of “declension” as a way of describing generational change, and the importance of Ramistic rationalism to Puritan thought, a suspicion is in the air that we may be stalled.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , December 1984 , pp. 343 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

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