The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

Some really interesting nuggets here, buried in page upon page of lackluster minutiae. As a non-historian, I'll leave method quibbles and questions of datedness aside, and say that I'd have much preferred something operating at a bit higher level of synthesis and taking in more than just theological and liturgical writings of Mass. Bay's ruling class. Miller brings us up to the edge of some pretty fascinating territory regarding the inner life of Puritans, the seeming contradictions their thought bridged between religious ecstasy and logical punctiliousness. Still, it all seems very stuck on paper, in terms both of its sources and the lack of lightness, or illumination, in its prose.

The biographical summary of Miller is interesting. A man who got his PhD in an era where 1 year of undergrad work, followed by three years of grad work after a hiatus traveling the world, could quite directly land tenure at Harvard. One thinks of Miller as a tweedy Harvard professor in the "consensus" era of historiography. Trapped inside the minutia of high culture debates, he seems one caught in the amber of historiographical time. Perhaps, as Stephen Foster implied in "New England and the Challenge of Heresy" (WMQ 1981), "division" and "dissention" did have an intimate association with "decline." What did Miller accomplish? He rescued the Puritans from the hands of the Progressive Historians, who had relegated them to the positions show more of demagogues and hypocrites. In the words of Bernard Bailyn, he "recast the image of New England origins from one of hypocrisy, savage intolerance and the stultification of the senses, to one of intellectual and spiritual splendor." (Bailyn's review of Errand into the Wilderness in Essex Institute).

It is indeed a different world in the sense of academic sociology, but also in terms of the types of things that interest scholars. As Hall points out in his "On Common Ground," the interest in social history of the 1960s and 70s certainly refocused the profession away from the close textual exegesis of Perry Miller's New England Mind. As social history came into fashion, so intellectual history went out. Even with the literary turn of the 80s and 90s, when we returned to the study of the Mathers' writings, it is more to understand their relationship with the popular press than it is to probe the depths of Calvinist - Puritan intellectual continuities. Within New England Studies, the impact of Gender (masculinity as well as femininity) have impacted our view of the clergy and interactions with the laity as they changed over time. See C Dayton (Taking the Trade). Today we celebrate difference, division and dissention. We sing with Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass ... "Do I contradict myself? So I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes" And we seek out the sources of social and cultural contest. We glory in our differences and in the genius of America in containing all of this ... show less