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Reviewed by:
  • Puritanism and Its Discontents
  • Laura M. Stevens (bio)
Puritanism and Its Discontents. Edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. 64 pp.

Puritanism and Its Discontents is an assortment of essays on diverse aspects of Puritanism, both as it was practiced and as it has been represented in England and America. A reworking of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), the English title of Freud's Das Unbehagen in der Kultur—in which, ironically, religion appears as mere explanatory device and palliative for the emotional woes that civilization cannot heal—provides a unifying concept for the many aspects of Puritan culture and belief treated by the book's contributors. Linking this book with its almost-namesake, Knoppers writes, "Puritans—like Freud's civilization—seem repressive and obsessed with guilt, generating neuroses and discontents" (9). The application of discontentment is broader, however, as it governs not only a Puritan theology driven by an abhorrence of complacency and [End Page 399] worries about one's predetermination for heaven or hell, but also the intense dissatisfaction Puritans inspired in others through their own unhappiness with the Church of England. This approach emerges partly from a desire to restore the "radical political and doctrinal edge" that Puritans seem to have lost in the twentieth century through revisionist studies of them "as conservative, moderate, and apolitical, negotiating a place within the mainstream of the English church and society until pushed into reaction" (9). In this way the collection offers a counterpoint to the work of scholars including Patrick Collinson, Peter Lake, and Nicholas Tyacke, who, in turn, have sought to correct the stereotype of the joyless, hypocritical Puritan that became so prominent through early modern comic characters such as Shakespeare's Malvolio or burlesque figures such as Samuel Butler's Sir Hudibras.

One effect of the focus on discontentment is to remind us why Puritans were targeted so fiercely and with such success in literature, now that many decades of scholarship have demonstrated how drastically these figures differed from the real people they claimed to represent. Another effect, one not as at odds with the collection's counter-revisionist goal as might seem, is to allow for a wide-ranging study of Puritanism by replacing a doctrinal, geographical, or social criterion for study with an affective one. That is, the emphasis on discontentment allows the book's editor and contributors to consider Puritanism as a religious and social movement that included Separatists and non-Separatists, in both England and America. It also provides a starting point for analyses well suited to historians and literary scholars alike, offering a sound context for interdisciplinary study.

Three essays will be of particular interest to early Americanists. Richard Pointer's "From Imitating Language to a Language of Imitation" interprets relations between Puritans and Indians in New England as "a discourse punctuated by the motifs of pattern, model, and example" (146). While imitation governed much early contact between Europeans and indigenous Americans, it was conceptually crucial to Puritans, who "saw themselves as originators or innovators of the originals set down in the biblical narrative," and the Indians of southern New England, who "were accustomed to conceiving time as 'the constant re-enactment of tradition' " (149). Puritans assumed that Indians would emulate their beliefs once they witnessed them, and they expressed concern that colonists would imitate Indian customs if overly exposed to them. Doubts about Indian conversions were [End Page 400] expressed through fears that such imitations were mere contrivance, an inauthentic mimicry meant to trick the English, and Indians in turn condemned the English as false inventors rather than imitators of an original and true religion. Pointer concludes with the intriguing suggestion that the diminishment of English interest in Indian conversion derived partly from doubts they themselves grew to feel in the imitative impulses of Puritanism by the end of the seventeenth century.

Timothy D. Hall's essay is an interpretation of the Antinomian controversy as "an effort to define properly the nature of justification, assurance, new birth, the new creature, and the newborn self 's relationship to the covenant community" (197). His study of this early crisis in New England favors intellectual over social explanations...

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