Download or read book The Notebook of the Reverend John Fiske 1644 1675 written by John Fiske and published by Peabody Essex Museum. This book was released on 1974 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Fiske began his ministry in the Wenham Church, Mass. in 1644 and died in Bay Colony, Mass. in Jan. 1677.
Download or read book Damned Women written by Elizabeth Reis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-18 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches. In negotiating their beliefs about the devil's powers, both women and men embedded womanhood in the discourse of depravity.Puritan ministers insisted that women and men were equal in the sight of God, with both sexes equally capable of cleaving to Christ or to the devil. Nevertheless, Reis explains, womanhood and evil were inextricably linked in the minds and hearts of seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Women and men feared hell equally but Puritan culture encouraged women to believe it was their vile natures that would take them there rather than the particular sins they might have committed.Following the Salem witchcraft trials, Reis argues, Puritans' understanding of sin and the devil changed. Ministers and laity conceived of a Satan who tempted sinners and presided physically over hell, rather than one who possessed souls in the living world. Women and men became increasingly confident of their redemption, although women more than men continued to imagine themselves as essentially corrupt, even after the Great Awakening.
Download or read book The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England written by Sarah Rivett and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Science of the Soul challenges long-standing notions of Puritan provincialism as antithetical to the Enlightenment. Sarah Rivett demonstrates that, instead, empiricism and natural philosophy combined with Puritanism to transform the scope of religious activity in colonial New England from the 1630s to the Great Awakening of the 1740s. In an unprecedented move, Puritan ministers from Thomas Shepard and John Eliot to Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards studied the human soul using the same systematic methods that philosophers applied to the study of nature. In particular, they considered the testimonies of tortured adolescent girls at the center of the Salem witch trials, Native American converts, and dying women as a source of material insight into the divine. Conversions and deathbed speeches were thus scrutinized for evidence of grace in a way that bridged the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the divine. In this way, the "science of the soul" was as much a part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy as it was part of post-Reformation theology. Rivett's account restores the unity of religion and science in the early modern world and highlights the role and importance of both to transatlantic circuits of knowledge formation.
Download or read book The Work of Self Representation written by Ivy Schweitzer and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Work of Self-Representation Ivy Schweitzer examines early American poetry through the critical lens of gender. Her concern is not the inclusion of female writers into the canon; rather, she analyzes how the metaphors of "woman" and "feminine" function in Puritan religious and literary discourse to represent both the "otherness" of spiritual experience and the ways in which race and class function to keep the "other" in marginalized positions. Schwetizer argues that gender was for seventeenth-century new England -- and still is today -- a basic and most politically charged metaphor for the differences that shape identity and determine cultural position. To glimpse the struggle between gender ideology and experience, Schweitzer provides close readings of the poetry of four New Englanders writing between the Great Migration and the first wave of the Great Awakening: John Fiske, Edward Taylor, Anne Bradstreet, and Roger Williams. Schweitzer focuses exclusively on lyric poetry, she says, because a first-person speaker wrestling with the intricacies of individual consciousness provides fruitful ground for exploring the politics of voice and identity and especially problems of authority, intertextuality, and positionality. Fiske and Taylor define the orthodox tradition, and Bradstreet and Williams in different ways challenge it. Her treatment of the familiar poetry of Bradstreet and Taylor is solidly grounded in historical and literary scholarship yet suggestive of the new insights gained from a gender analysis, while discussions of Fiske and Williams bring their little-known lyric work to light. Taken together, these poets' texts illustrate the cultural construction of a troubled masculinity and an idealized, effaced femininity implicit in the Puritan notion of redeemed subjectivity, and constitute a profoundly disturbing and resilient part of our Puritan legacy.
Download or read book The Ruin of All Witches written by Malcolm Gaskill and published by Random House. This book was released on 2024-08-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping story of a family tragedy brought about by witch-hunting in Puritan New England that combines history, anthropology, sociology, politics, theology and psychology. “The best and most enjoyable kind of history writing. Malcolm Gaskill goes to meet the past on its own terms and in its own place…Thought-provoking and absorbing." —Hilary Mantel, best-selling author of Wolf Hall In Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails, property vanishes, and people suffer convulsions as if possessed by demons. A woman is seen wading through the swamp like a lost soul. Disturbing dreams and visions proliferate. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics and the community becomes tangled in a web of distrust, resentment and denunciation. The finger of suspicion soon falls on a young couple with two small children: the prickly brickmaker, Hugh Parsons, and his troubled wife, Mary. Drawing on rich, previously unexplored source material, Malcolm Gaskill vividly evokes a strange past, one where lives were steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in omens, curses and enchantments. The Ruin of All Witches captures an entire society caught in agonized transition between superstition and enlightenment, tradition and innovation.
Download or read book Religion in American History written by Amanda Porterfield and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-04-26 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This student-friendly introduction combines both thematic and chronological approaches in exploring the pivotal role religion played in American history - and of its impact across a range of issues, from identity formation and politics, to race, gender, and class. A comprehensive introduction to American religious history that successfully combines thematic and chronological approaches, aiding both teaching and learning Brings together a stellar cast of experts to trace the development of theology, the political order, practice, and race, ethnicity, gender and class throughout America's history Accessibly structured in to four key eras: Exploration and Encounter (1492-1676); The Atlantic World (1676-1802); American Empire (1803-1898); and Global Reach (1898-present). Investigates the role of religion in forming people's identities, emotional experiences, social conflict, politics, and patriotism
Download or read book Puritans in the New World written by David D. Hall and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Puritans in the New World tells the story of the powerful yet turbulent culture of the English people who embarked on an "errand into the wilderness." It presents the Puritans in their own words, shedding light on the lives both of great dissenters such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and of the orthodox leaders who contended against them. Classics of Puritan expression, like Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, Anne Bradstreet's poetry, and William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation appear alongside texts that are less well known but no less important: confessions of religious experience by lay people, the "diabolical" possession of a young woman, and the testimony of Native Americans who accept Christianity. Hall's chapter introductions provide a running history of Puritanism in seventeenth-century New England and alert readers to important scholarship. Above all, this is a collection of texts that vividly illuminates the experience of being a Puritan in the New World. The book will be welcomed by all those who are interested in early American literature, religion, and history.
Download or read book A Reforming People written by David D. Hall and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguished historian Hall presents a revelatory account of New England's Puritans that shows them to have been the most daring and successful reformers of the Anglo-colonial world.
Download or read book The Land Before Her written by Annette Kolodny and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women's writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated. Both intellectual and cultural history, this volume continues Kolodny's study of frontier mythology begun in The Lay of the Land.
Download or read book Coming Over written by David Cressy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987-10-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coming Over discusses the English migration to New England in the seventeenth century and shows the importance of English connections in the lives of American colonists. David Cressy reviews the information available to prospective migrants, the decisions they had to reach and the actions necessary before they could settle in America. English men and women moved to New England with a variety of motives, and in a multitude of circumstances. 'Puritanism', involving religious harassment in England and the desire to follow God's ordinances in America, was only one of many factors impelling people to move. Rather than developing in wilderness isolation, the society and culture of seventeenth-century New England were constantly shaped by their English roots. A two-way flow of correspondence, messages and information linked colonists to their homeland. Family duties, political sympathies, friendships, business and legal obligations all led to a continuing attachment across the Atlantic. In treating early America from a British perspective, as a part of English history, Professor Cressy provides us with many insights into the seventeenth century.
Download or read book American Women s Autobiography written by Margo Culley and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focus on the works of Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gertrude Stein, Mary McCarthy, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others.
Download or read book Darkness Falls on the Land of Light written by Douglas L. Winiarski and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors of today's evangelical movement, bitterly assaulted the Congregational establishment. The 1740s and 1750s were the dark night of the New England soul, as men and women groped toward a restructured religious order. Conflict transformed inclusive parishes into exclusive networks of combative spiritual seekers. Then as now, evangelicalism emboldened ordinary people to question traditional authorities. Their challenge shattered whole communities.
Download or read book Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard s Church in Cambridge 1638 1649 written by Lori Rogers-Stokes and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-23 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a revolutionary new reading of manuscript records left by puritan minister Thomas Shepard in Cambridge, Massachusetts that have been studied for decades as his on-the-spot recording of oral relations of faith delivered by candidates for church membership. This book proves that these records are not relations, but Shepard’s personal record of sessions of trial—meetings with candidates still working out their spiritual seeking. New transcriptions of the original manuscript records, and corresponding never-before-published writing by Shepard, dispel much of the confusion produced by the published transcriptions. Close-readings of the manuscripts, contrasted with the published transcriptions, set the stage for a new understanding of puritan spiritual preparation in Shepard’s Cambridge church. The book concludes with a challenge to the negative reading of the women’s records that is central to established scholarship, revealing their powerful, confident spiritual identities and voices.
Download or read book John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay written by Kathryn N. Gray and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of John Eliot’s mission to the Algonquian-speaking people of Massachusetts Bay, from his arrival in 1631 until his death in 1690. It explores John Eliot’s determination to use the Massachusett dialect of Algonquian, both in speech and in print, as a language of conversion and Christianity. The book analyzes the spoken words of religious conversion and the written transcription of those narratives; it also considers the Algonquian language texts and English language texts which Eliot published to support the mission. Central to this study is an insistence that John Eliot consciously situated his mission within a tapestry of contesting transatlantic and political forces, and that this framework had a direct impact on the ways in which Native American penitents shaped and contested their Christian identities. To that end, the study begins by examining John Eliot’s transatlantic network of correspondents and missionary-supporters in England, it then considers the impact of conversion narratives in spoken and written forms, and ends by evaluating the impact of literacy on praying Indian communities. The study maps the coalescence of different communities that shaped, or were shaped by, Eliot’s seventeenth-century mission.
Download or read book Early New England written by David A. Weir and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of covenant was at the heart of early New England society. In this singular book David Weir explores the origins and development of covenant thought in America by analyzing the town and church documents written and signed by seventeenth-century New Englanders. Unmatched in the breadth of its scope, this study takes into account all of the surviving covenants in all of the New England colonies. Weir's comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century covenants leads to a more complex picture of early New England than what emerges from looking at only a few famous civil covenants like the Mayflower Compact. His work shows covenant theology being transformed into a covenantal vision for society but also reveals the stress and strains on church-state relationships that eventually led to more secularized colonial governments in eighteenth-century New England. He concludes that New England colonial society was much more "English" and much less "American" than has often been thought, and that the New England colonies substantially mirrored religious and social change in Old England.
Download or read book The Puritan Conversion Narrative written by Patricia Caldwell and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1985-11-29 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-seventeenth century, persons on both sides of the Atlantic wishing to join a Puritan church had to appear before all of its members and tell the story of their religious conversion - in effect, to give convincing verbal evidence that their souls were saved. This book explores the testimonies of spiritual experience delivered by puritans in the mid-seventeenth century in order to qualify for membership of their local churches.
Download or read book Governing the Tongue written by Jane Kamensky and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-02-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governing the Tongue explains why the spoken word assumed such importance in the culture of early New England. In a work that is at once historical, socio-cultural, and linguistic, Jane Kamensky explores the little-known words of unsung individuals, and reconsiders such famous Puritan events as the banishment of Anne Hutchinson and the Salem witch trials, to expose the ever-present fear of what the Puritans called "sins of the tongue." But even while dangerous or deviant speech was restricted, as Kamensky illustrates here, godly speech was continuously praised and promoted. Congregations were told that one should lift one's voice "like a trumpet" to God and "cry out and cease not." By placing speech at the heart of New England's early history, Kamensky develops new ideas about the complex relationship between speech and power in both Puritan New England and, by extension, our world today.
