The Science Of The Soul In Colonial New England

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.

Presents an historical analysis of the Salem witch trials, examining the factors that may have led to the mass hysteria, including a possible occurrence of ergot poisoning, a frontier war in Maine, and local political rivalries.

John Eliot (1604–90) has been called “the apostle to the Indians.” This book looks at Eliot not from the perspective of modern Protestant “mission” studies (the approach mainly adopted by previous research) but in the historical and theological context of seventeenth-century puritanism. Drawing on recent research on migration to New England, the book argues that Eliot, like many other migrants, went to New England primarily in search of a safe haven to practice pure reformed Christianity, not to convert Indians. Eliot’s Indian ministry started from a fundamental concern for the conversion of the unconverted, which he derived from his experience of the puritan movement in England. Consequently, for Eliot, the notion of New England Indian “mission” was essentially conversion-oriented, Word-centered, and pastorally focused, and (in common with the broader aims of New England churches) pursued a pure reformed Christianity. Eliot hoped to achieve this through the establishment of Praying Towns organized on a biblical model—where preaching, pastoral care, and the practice of piety could lead to conversion—leading to the formation of Indian churches composed of “sincere converts.”

This book reconsiders the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States and its consequent cultural and literary histories.

In the seventeenth-century English Atlantic, religious beliefs and practices played a central role in creating racial identity. English Protestantism provided a vocabulary and structure to describe and maintain boundaries between insider and outsider. In this path-breaking study, Heather Miyano Kopelson peels back the layers of conflicting definitions of bodies and competing practices of faith in the puritan Atlantic, demonstrating how the categories of “white,” “black,” and “Indian” developed alongside religious boundaries between “Christian” and “heathen” and between “Catholic” and “Protestant.” Faithful Bodies focuses on three communities of Protestant dissent in the Atlantic World: Bermuda, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In this “puritan Atlantic,” religion determined insider and outsider status: at times Africans and Natives could belong as long as they embraced the Protestant faith, while Irish Catholics and English Quakers remained suspect. Colonists’ interactions with indigenous peoples of the Americas and with West Central Africans shaped their understandings of human difference and its acceptable boundaries. Prayer, religious instruction, sexual behavior, and other public and private acts became markers of whether or not blacks and Indians were sinning Christians or godless heathens. As slavery became law, transgressing people of color counted less and less as sinners in English puritans’ eyes, even as some of them made Christianity an integral part of their communities. As Kopelson shows, this transformation proceeded unevenly but inexorably during the long seventeenth century.

Students and scholars have long turned to the two-volume Documentary History of Religion in America for access to the most significant primary sources relating to American religious history. Published here in a single volume for the first time, the work in this fourth edition has been both updated and condensed, allowing instructors to more easily use the material in one semester. --

The United States has a long history of religious pluralism, and yet Americans have often thought that people’s faith determines their eternal destinies. The result is that Americans switch religions more often than any other nation. Lincoln Mullen traces the history of the distinctively American idea that religion is a matter of individual choice.

Prologue: The literary cosmopolis and its legal past -- The law of nations and the sources of the cosmopolis -- The cosmopolitan covenant -- The manufactured millennium -- Evidentiary cosmopolitanism -- Cosmopolitan communication and the discourse of pietism -- Epilogue: The law of the cosmopolis and its literary past