Puritans Again?: New Insights from the Writings of Colonial New Englanders

When the Institute of Early American History and Culture published David D. Hall's The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century in 1972, scholarship in what was generally known as "Puritan New England" was flourishing. The decade had opened with the excitement of new approaches to local history: Kenneth Lockridge's A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts 1636–1736 (1970); Philip Greven's Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (1970); John Demos's A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (1970); and Michael Zuckerman's Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (1970). That same year saw the publication of T. H. Breen's The Character of a Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630–1730 (1970). The following year Stephen Foster published Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (1971). In the decades that have followed, each of these authors has continued to make important contributions to our understanding of colonial America, but most have expanded their interests beyond New England and the seventeenth century. While engaging in explorations of other, related areas, Hall's focus has remained rooted in the society he first wrote about.

The Faithful Shepherd focused on the Puritan clergy, their sense of identity, and their message. In many ways it followed the pattern well established by scholars such as Perry Miller and Edmund S. Morgan of seeking to understand the intellectual life of early New England by focusing on the ministers. But in American Puritanism: Faith and Practice (1970), Darrett Rutman had challenged students of American religion to answer the question of whether the faith expounded from the pulpit was the same as that internalized by the men and women in the pews. In the years after The Faithful Shepherd, Hall set out to explore that challenge in various ways. He has probed the nature of popular religion in a variety of contexts. Part of this involved the assembling of documents relating to two of the most notorious episodes in the region's history. Hall had already explored the clash between clerical elite and lay enthusiasts that centered around Anne Hutchinson in a carefully selected and skillfully edited collection on The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (1968) and followed that up with another valuable collection focusing on Witch-hunting in Seventeenth Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638–1693 (1999).

The insights he gained into popular religion in early New England were set forth in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in New England (1989), which remains his most popular book. Among the important contributions of that volume was the discussion of literacy and the exploration of the degree to which the shaping of ministerial publications was influenced by the character of the audience. This reflected Hall's growing interest in the interrelationship between reading, writing, and publication, an interest which led him to devote time and effort to charting the history of the book. That focus led to the publication of Cultures of Print (1996) and The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (2000).

Closely related to his interest in popular religious thought was an interest in "lived religion." Following his appointment to the faculty of Harvard Divinity School in 1989, Hall and his students began to draw upon sociology and anthropology to examine religious practice in expanding their investigation of popular religion from belief to practice. The richness of this approach was amply demonstrated in the volume he edited on Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (1997). Employing this approach Hall dug deeper into the colonial era in an effort to understand the totality of religious experience. The result has been a richly nuanced picture of the complexities of New England life...