From Human Suffering to Divine Friendship: Meat out of the Eater and Devotional Reading in Early New England

Michael Wigglesworth believed he was given “exceeding much help & assistance from Heaven, even to admiration” as he was writing Meat out of the Eater, his “poems about the cross” (Notebook September 17, 1669). Often ill and unable to preach, the Malden pastor spent much of his career versifying devotional guidance, transferring pastoral counsel to poetry. Following eight years after the Day of Doom, his better-known work, Meat out of the Eater (1670) proved nearly as popular. Like its predecessor, Meat out of the Eater was easily accessible in language and form. Wigglesworth openly guided his readers’ use, deliberately constructing the work to engage the affections and inner life. Departing from the conversionary impulse of Day of Doom, Meat out of the Eater was intended to console Christians in the midst of colonial life’s inevitable hardships. In the poems Wigglesworth addressed one form of that deep paradox of reversal well known to Puritans, the mysterious claim that a person has to lose something in order to gain it, that death is the necessary way to life, or, in this case, that human suffering, willingly accepted as sent by God’s hand, could lead to the greatest of all goods, divine friendship. In developing these ideas Wigglesworth hardly acted in literary isolation. Rather, he gave his own expression to a mode of spiritual practice crafted by Elizabethan Puritans and steeped in centuries of Christian tradition. His own development of these themes would guide the devotional lives of New Englanders for almost a century.

This study first considers evidence from extant volumes, including marginalia, in order to ask how colonial readers might have engaged with the work. It then addresses the biblical and historical resonances of the title before situating the poems within the genre of Puritan devotional manuals and writings on affliction. Next it turns to the first half of the work, the Meditations, which offer a personal invitation to see the world providentially and aim for a broad readership. Here the focus is especially on the ninth meditation, which initiates the transition from head knowledge to heart knowledge, or devotional performance. A consideration of the second half of the work, “Riddles Unriddled,” further uncovers the ways Wigglesworth asked his readers to participate in dialogues and exercises that move from specific kinds of pain to spiritual comfort. This reading of the poems leads to a discussion of their afterlife in later works that drew on Meat out of the Eater and its themes of affective transformation and divine friendship. Ultimately this reading suggests a way of resolving a conundrum at the heart of Puritan experience. From one perspective, Puritans’ radical rejection of intermediaries such as priests, ceremonies, and sacred objects meant they were thrown back on themselves without any stable religious ritual, resulting in persistent anxiety. However, Meat out of the Eater and other popular devotional manuals offer a way of seeing how an antiformalistic religious culture was able to produce enduring resources aimed primarily at consolation.

Meat out of the Eater was a colonial steady seller, with five Boston editions between 1670 and 1717. As with Day of Doom, extant volumes are rare, often very worn, and sometimes repaired with hand-sewn stitches—signs of extensive use. Owners’ marks give some indication of readership. One 1717 copy is simply inscribed, “Moses Stickney Hath Read this Book and highly he astemeth it.” Anna Roper wrote her name three times in various sections of a 1689 volume—whether for devotional use or handwriting practice it is impossible to know.¹ On another 1689 copy Mary Plimpton added the conventional rhyme that signified a deliberate kind of ownership:

Mary Plimpton Her BookGod give Her grace there in to loockthat She may Run that Blessed Rasethat Heaven may bee Her Dwelling plase.²

Elisabeth Bennet wrote her name and then “her book and hand / my book and heart / shall never part”—somehow the third person of the traditional rhyme was inadequate to convey her relationship to the volume. At least seven other members of the...