The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (review)

If you are like me, it probably escaped your notice that René Descartes's Discourse on Method and Anne Hutchinson's "immediate revelation" appeared in the same year: 1637. Not so Sarah Rivett, who has written a learned and convincing account, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England, explaining why figures typically separated into the "reason" or "faith" camps were instead fellow respondents to the shared, postlapsarian condition of epistemological uncertainty. In this characteristic critical moment, Rivett sees Descartes and Hutchinson as "two sides of the same coin, for Descartes affirms certainty of God's existence by separating it from human reason" (232). Whereas it is in Descartes's cogito that scholars typically locate the origin of a modern bifurcation within the human cognitive stance toward material and immaterial worlds, Rivett shows how Descartes continued, like Hutchinson, to trust in "revealed truths" (233).

Broadly described, Rivett has written a book about "those who wished to salvage reason and empiricism as avenues for the study of God" (239). Descartes is just one of many European authors, typically placed in a history of Enlightenment science trajectory, whom Rivett reads as equally invested in a science of the soul. Another key example is that of Francis Bacon, whose Advancement of Learning (1605), a text many scholars see as inaugurating modern empiricism, was published just two years after he wrote a short pamphlet entitled The Confession of Faith. Rivett is by no means the first scholar to draw attention to the very Christian, and at times millenarian, orientation of seventeenth-century natural philosophers (the religiosity in particular of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton has received much attention), but I would say that she is the first scholar to investigate the intricate and sustained Atlantic conversation through which an early modern science of the soul was essayed. In this capacity, Rivett's real contribution comes in the chapters in which—after setting the English and Continental stage—Rivett traces the particular evidentiary status colonial locales held for practicing and refining this science.

As the avant-garde of radical English Protestantism in the 1630s, Massachusetts became an active "laboratory of grace" (131) as colonists there pursued a vision of corporate sainthood. Rivett shows how various Puritan theologians adapted both Calvin and Bacon to observe the secret workings of divinity not only in themselves as individuals but also in the collective through communal acts of spiritual detection and narration. She then explores the establishment of a gendered line between male and female public confession in this period. In New England, Rivett argues, as opposed to England and Ireland, men in public confessions performed a "self-discovering 'I'" whereas women tended to testify to unknowing, to the more fallen side of the Adamic predicament. What was an inherent tension within Calvinism between certainty and uncertainty became, in New England, a gendered distinction. Rivett next turns to Indian conversion accounts and dictionaries to argue that transcribed Indian languages (Algonquin in this case) came to be studied as a key to unlocking a pre-Babel universal "character" rather than being held up as a sign of epistemological defect as would be the case in a typical translatio imperii narrative.

Rivett, turning toward the late seventeenth century, takes up a genre that she terms "tokenography," comprising narratives in which "[m]inisters and laypeople attempted to capture the essence of spiritual plentitude in the moment before death through a written record of divine translation from death to life, from the visible to the invisible world, from the dark glass of limited perception to unfiltered revelation" (178). Tokenography took for its subjects the "weaker earthen vessels," namely dying children, young women, and Indians, and in so doing, shifted a sense of privileged testimonial validity (vis-à--vis the invisible world) to these groups. In the final two chapters—on the Salem witchcraft trials and early eighteenth-century evangelical Christians (especially Jonathan Edwards)—Rivett charts how the rise of mechanical philosophy did not quash...