Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676 (review)

It was the mid-60s, and I was struggling with my first encounter with Edward Taylor’s poems. Although I was acquainted with seventeenth-century English literature, especially the metaphysical poets, Taylor’s elliptical transitions and oblique allusions resisted familiar reckoning. The poems read as if precious Renaissance legacies had been clumsily smashed into countless shards and then randomly scattered about by a frenzied mind.

Some of these scattered pieces, closely considered, did not conform to then-current expectations about proper subject matter for a Puritan author, least of all for a distinctively conservative Congregationalist minister such as Taylor. Understandably, there were critical efforts to explain or (more often) explain away any apparent problems suggested by the poet’s unusual interests and manner. It is not surprising that an improbable Taylor family story emerged, contending (despite ample manuscript evidence to the contrary) that the poet had misgivings about his writings and so had instructed his heirs not to publish them.

On the one hand, Taylor’s poems seemed to early critics to evince an unexpected and hard-to-explain Roman Catholic sensibility. On the other hand, the poems also seemed to reflect an inappropriate fascination with the material world, including a peculiar familiarity with seemingly non- Christian occult knowledge. If in 1684 Taylor mocked “The Boasting Spagyrist,” the botanic alchemist “Whose Words out strut the Sky” (“Meditation 1.9”), in 1706 he comfortably applied the alchemical notion of a hypothetical universal panacea in his celebration of Christ as “the Heavenly Alkahest” (“Meditation 2.68[B]”).

There was information available, albeit out of sight on the fringe of other disciplines, that might have aided a clearer understanding of some elements of Taylor’s unexpected interests. It would have been particularly helpful, for instance, to come upon studies of European alchemists who coalesced Christian beliefs, Paracelsian medicine, commercial exchange, natural philosophy, and scientific mysticism. That we still do not adequately appreciate the impact of this ideational convergence in ordinary Puritan lives is the intriguing thesis of Walter W. Woodward’s thoroughly researched, highly readable, and insightful Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676.

The mid-60s approach to the Puritans has given way to a more complex appreciation of their messy political, sectarian, gender, and transcultural entanglements. Oddly, though, we still have much to learn about the welter of ideation and emotion that passed for normal in the personal lives of Puritans. It was as late as 1989, for instance, that David D. Hall’s Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England emphasized the typical amalgam of religious dogma and superstition—the debris of much older conceptual systems based on astrology, sympathetic magic and alchemical medicine—that composed the Puritan imagination.

By delving into the quest of John Winthrop, Jr., for occult knowledge, Woodward intends to demonstrate that “the practice of alchemical medicine in early New England was pervasive” (209). Winthrop was hardly an obscure figure at the periphery of his culture. The son of a famous man, Winthrop’s “affable, entrepreneurial personality, intercultural sensitivity, political savvy, and scientific knowledge helped him parlay that preferment into positions of Atlantic world eminence” (43). The well-traveled Winthrop served as governor of Connecticut colony for eighteen years. Also, as a founding member of the Royal Society (a hub for political, economic, religious, and scientific exchange), he plied influential contacts within the Restoration court to secure the 1662 charter for his colony.

When society members importuned Winthrop to write a natural history of his colony, he agreed but never produced the document. In fact, despite his firsthand knowledge of mining, he feigned a lack of data about mineral wealth and downplayed local resources precisely to forestall the Crown’s interest in a colonial unification plan that would diminish self-rule. There were, as...