Does Evidence Matter? : Puritanism Revised, Reviled, and Deconstructed

DOES EVIDENCEMATTER? PURITANISMREVISED,REVILED, AND DECONSTRUCTED Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Societv, and Politics in Colonial America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. xii + 291 pp. Illus. Toby L. Ditz. Property and Kinship: Inheritance in Early Connecticut, 1750-1820. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. xvi+ 213pp. Leon Howard. Essays on Puritans and Puritanism, eds., James Barbour and Thomas Quirk. Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. xiii + 22I pp. Ann Kibbey. The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice and Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. xi + 203 pp. Amy Schrager Lang. Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. xii + 237 pp. Edmund Leites. The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. xi + 191 pp. Teresa Toulouse. The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. xii+ 211 pp. Michael A. Bellesiles When confronted with evidence that he had spoken words which might be construed as support for Anne Hutchinson, John Cotton replied angrily that the problem was with his audience, not him. For "if men that hear me, do instead of my words take up words of their own and carry them to infer other conclusions,'' both contradiction and confusion ensue. Cotton insisted that he could not be faulted if Hutchinson and others heard his calls for a spiritual awakening as a license to preach their own spiritual superiority. 1 The question of interpretation continues to be a central issue in Puritan studies. When is it appropriate to call the meanings of someone's words into doubt? Is it sufficient to rely purely on modern logic, on what the scholar feels should have been meant or would have been meant if only the speaker understood his or her own hidden meanings? Or should we demand evidence? Do we not need some indication that the person under question actually acted in some fashion which contradicts spoken or written sentences? If one believes that one has discovered that Puritans meant "certainly" by "doubt" or "inclusive" by "exclusive," 234 Michael A. Bellesiles then clearly the historical portrait of Colonial New England must be altered. In one way or another, that is the issue which these seven books all address: just what were the Puritans saying, and were they sincere about it? Together, these scholars enrich our understanding of Puritanism by exploring the deeper implications of religion in the society of early New England. Puritanism is difficult to pin down. Indeed, defining and demarcating this key set of religious beliefs was as much a problem for contemporaries as it is for historians. People with very different theological views could independently consider themselves Puritans. As late as the Great Awakening of the 1740s, both evangelicals and liberals insisted that they were maintaining the true traditions of their Puritan predecessors. David Grayson Allen, in a study of five Massachusetts towns, found that the local religious views ''ranged from mild episcopacy to proto-Quakerism and a restive presbyteriansim.'' All of these thought of themselves as Puritan and would have been shocked to find their orihodoxy questioned . 2 Too often historians treat Puritanism as a monolith, as a definite theology which we, and one imagines, all the Puritans, can easily agree upon. Yet, as Patricia Bonomi notes, a single congregation might contain "diverse religious groups" which "were obliged to share church buildings and even ministers. "(7) As Puritans struggled between the conflicting emphases in their theology on community and exclusivity, rationality and the emotion of conversion, congregational authority and an educated ministry, and individual experience and order, many came to choose one path over the others. By 1770, Puritanism had fragmented, but hardly vanished. The most inclusive view of Puritanism, and the most nonchalant approach to evidence, is to be found in Edmund Leites's Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality. Leites purports to call into question traditional views of repressed Puritan sexuality, a task Edmund Morgan performed most effectively in 1942.3 Yet Leites does the opposite, stating that the Puritans transformed " 'merrie old England' into a more sober and steady world.'' (1...