In Retrospect: Robert Middlekauff's The Mathers

Robert Middlekauf. The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

In 1971, Robert Middlekauff published The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728. Reviewers quickly traced its bloodlines to Perry Miller's majestic tomes on the New England mind and pronounced it an improvement of the stock. David Lovejoy, whose then-recent anthology on religious enthusiasm forecast his later study of the subject, ¹ noted that "There are a number of similarities between" Miller's and Middlekauff's approaches but warned that "a full-scale comparison would be a mistake," for it would "fail to bring out the full value" of Middlekauff's work. "Those who are comfortably assured that the course of Puritan thought was devoid of emotion and by necessity a slow accommodation to a materialistic, secular world are in for a surprise," Lovejoy concluded, "for the Mathers and Middlekauff offer no such comfort." ² Michael Hall, who in 1988 would issue his own biography of Increase Mather, declared Miller's New England Mind "the only comparable book" and averred that The Mathers was "superior in design." Middlekauff did not command "Miller's brilliance and richness of language," Hall judged, "but his book is unusually well written and far easier to comprehend," a proposition with which anyone who has tried to find a topic sentence amid Miller's exquisitely baroque prose will readily concur. The volume, Hall concluded, "is, more than most histories, a work of original, personal, creative scholarship." ³ With such praise from leading historians, it is hardly surprising that The Mathers won the Bancroft Prize.

The casualness with which reviewers measured Middlekauff against Miller elegizes the state of early American history a generation ago. Few books are now identified so closely upon publication with the aegis of an established scholar or assessed so readily in terms of their contribution to a major interpretive tradition. No colossus--neither an individual like Perry Miller nor a field like Puritanism--bestrides the colonial world. Historians eschew controlling narratives and do not lament their absence. Esteemed equal to the field's canonic tomes in its own day, The Mathers thirty years on seems oddly to have dropped from sight, reason enough to take stock of its accomplishment and abiding impact. ⁴ Such an exercise also involves ruminating on methodological fashions and the vagaries of reputation.

To measure The Mathers most aptly entails examining its ancestry, the venerable narrative of colonial New England intellectual history pioneered at Harvard by Kenneth Murdock and Samuel Eliot Morison but elaborated and perfected by Perry Miller. Miller posited that "the mind of man is the basic factor in human history," hence to "ge[t] at" American history's "fundamental themes"--as he huffed that the "'social historians'" of his day, complacently publishing "monographs on stoves or bathtubs, or tax laws, banks, the conduct of presidential elections, or . . . inventories of artifacts," had failed to do--one had to study the evolution of ideas. ⁵ New England provided the "ideal laboratory" for such an endeavor, since its isolation, cultural homogeneity, and lack of social complexity afforded an opportunity "as nearly perfect as the student is apt to find, for extracting certain generalizations about the relations of thought or ideas to communal experience." ⁶ Vouchsafed a vision while unloading oil drums in the Belgian Congo to expound "the innermost propulsion of the United States," Miller determined that he had to "begin at the beginning," which meant, it turned out, commencing "with the Puritan migration," even though one or two of his instructors warned him that trafficking with the Saints would be hazardous to his professional health, since the subject was exhausted and "nothing but chaff" remained. ⁷ The result was . . . history, a series of brilliant works detailing the rise and fall of an ideational complex.

From 1933, when he brought out Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, until his death thirty years later, Miller adumbrated an interpretation of Puritanism simultaneously...