The Politics of Culture in Provincial New England

In one of the most effective passages of Seers of God, author Michael Winship recounts the story of seventeenth-century Ipswich settler John Dane’s close encounter with providential meaning through the behavior of his prize pig. Dane had gone hunting to replenish an empty larder when he noticed that his pig was not far behind. Looking for signs of divine meaning in this unanticipated event, Dane determined that he should return home, and on the way he bagged a goose from a flock flying over head. Clearly God had used the pig to intervene mercifully in the ordinary affairs of Dane’s family. Winship skillfully juxtaposes this story with an account of New England theologian John Norton’s definition of providentialism—the belief that God continually intervened in people’s lives, communicating signs of their place on the road to Hell or redemption. Seventeenth-century New England was an enchanted world as David Hall has suggested in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989). People had visions that gave them glimpses of the supernatural in their daily lives, and they constantly interpreted signs to learn if God was visiting them in mercy or judgment. Seers of God examines the transition from the enchanted world of Dane and Norton to the “desacralized” world of the early eighteenth century in which providentialism largely disappeared. “How and to what extent,” Winship asks, “were the imperatives of the early Enlightenment absorbed into Massachusetts culture” (p. 5)?

With the exception of a handful of studies, most long outdated, the relationship between Puritanism and the Enlightenment remains largely unexplored. ¹ Perry Miller, in The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953), argued that Puritanism in the early eighteenth century succumbed to the weight of its inner contradictions. Henry May (The Enlightenment in America, 1976) contended that New England thinkers generally accommodated the balanced cosmology of Newton and Locke without serious intellectual dislocation until the middle of the eighteenth century. Robert Middlekauff’s The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (1971) suggested that although Cotton Mather experimented with rational religion in the early eighteenth century, he gradually awakened to its corrosive effect on Puritan sensibilities, and in the last years of his life he came perilously close to positing subjective experience as the only authentic test of religious truth. Images of disintegration, assimilation, excitement, and retreat appear in the literature, but there is no consensus on the fate of Puritanism in eighteenth-century culture, and the study of the American Enlightenment has not caught the imagination of American historians.

Given the ambitiousness of this project, nothing less than the reinterpretation of provincial New England culture in an Anglo-American context, it is somewhat surprising that Winship chose to tell this story through an analysis of the transformation of Cotton Mather’s thinking on providentialism. Winship argues however, that Mather was subject to the same cultural pressures as other exemplars of learned culture in England and Massachusetts and that the extraordinary breadth of his intellect and unusual amount of documentation should not prevent us from seeing that his attempt to integrate the ideas of the early Enlightenment with Puritan traditions exemplifies the larger dilemmas, strategies and resolutions of the culture itself.

The key to understanding this intellectual transition, Winship argues, lies in the cultural politics of post-Restoration England. The Enlightenment in England took the form of a campaign by Anglican church leaders and some Dissenters to defuse the radicalism of Puritan religious thought, to tame the enthusiasm of revolutionary ideology, and to channel belief toward deference to civil authority. Restoration thinkers believed that the Puritan insistence on the ability of the godly to interpret and act on the basis of providential meanings revealed in wonders—visions, earthquakes, and other unusual events—left radicals too free to challenge the social and political order on their own terms. Thus they set out to discredit such Puritan...