Introduction: the new Puritan studies / Bryce Traister -- Part I. Unexpected Puritans -- Sovereignty and grace: Hobbes and the Puritans / Paul Downes -- Sabbatai Sevi and the Ottoman Jews in increase Mather's The mystery of Israel's salvation / Nan Goodman -- Benjamin Colman, laughter, and church membership in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Massachusetts / Michael Schuldiner -- A pre-millennial portrait during the revocation of the Massachusetts charter / Linda M. Johnson -- Part II. Puritanism's others -- Imperial translations: new world missionary linguistics, indigenous interpreters, and universal languages in the early modern era / Allison Margaret Bigelow -- Native poetics in Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England / Betty Booth Donohue -- Pregnancy and anxiety: medicine, religion, and the occult in Cotton Mather's The Angel of Bethesda / Brice Peterson -- Piracy, piety, and providence in Cotton Mather's The vial poured out upon the sea / Jason M. Payton -- Part III. Puritan afterlives -- Puritan acts and monuments / Jonathan Beecher Field -- Toward digital Puritan studies: iconoclasm, child mortality, and patterns of mourning in the Farber gravestone collection / Harry Brown -- What do we know about the New England Puritans, and when did we know it? Twenty-first century reconsiderations of William Bradford and John Winthrop / Michael Ditmore -- Claiming the high ground: Catholics, Protestants, and the City on a Hill / Abram Van Engen -- Afterword: '... and American literature' / Bryce Traister.
Summary:
"This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.