Millennial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Contexts, 1630-1860 (review)

One way to cast the current humanist's historicism might be as follows: it combines a recovery of specific texts and contexts from the past, a hermeneutical self-awareness about such recovery, and a concern for the effects of reading this recovery across the temporal axes of past, present, and future. So understood, the academy's historicist moment makes millennialism—with its resurrection of sacred discourses and its convergent interests in interpretation and action-in-time—ripe for inquiry. The essays in Millennial Thought in America invite such consideration, and a number of them advance our understanding of both millennialism and historicism. These contributions avail themselves of the insights of historiography, social theory, and post-structuralism that have driven recent historicist scholarship; a few others, however, do not, seeming to replay ideas carefully presented by early Americanists of the 1970s and 1980s.

Organized chronologically, the volume features at the start strong essays on early New England. Joerg Fichte examines John Cotton's sermons on Revelation from 1639 to 1642 as both an extension of his concerns about church governance in The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven and as a contextual response to questions of state power emerging from Laudian and post-Laudian rule. Instead of privileging the New England Way, Cotton is, for Fichte, "cautiously millennial" and "territorially unlimited" (57). Cotton uses Revelation to promote a theocratic, congregational authority—an authority in the 1640s seemingly closer to hand in post-1642 England than in unstable New England—as evidence for and prelude to Christ's thousand-year reign. Reiner Smolinski revisits the Cotton-Williams debate over church and state through an agile understanding of each figure's millennialism. His claim is that the debate "was spurred more by their disparate interpretations of millenarian prophecies than by their different conceptions of ecclesiastical polity," and he draws on both the "bloody tenent" texts and Cotton's reading of Canticles and Revelations for the argument (93). After noting post-Enlightenment misreadings of the debate and then restaging the charges against Williams in 1635, Smolinski shows that the two "parted company on whether typological precedent from the Old Testament was still prescriptive for the Christian Church," with Cotton's literalist application of the types differing from Williams's allegorizing belief in the abrogation of Judaic law (67). So, too, the pair differ in their readings of church history. Cotton defends an apostolic continuity from the first century to the Church of England, while Williams sees contemporary institutions as part of the antichristian end days. By way of these eschatological concerns, Smolinski concludes the essay with a careful analysis of each thinker's exegesis, sorting out the late Reformation's diverse "millenarian taxonomies" in order to specify the antagonists' views of the millennium's new earth, church, and heaven (80).

While intellectual history informs Smolinski's discussion, Michael Clark employs linguistic analysis to comprehend the millennialist vision in writings of seventeenth-century New England. The transformation of space and time augured by millennialism is portrayed "as a fundamental shift in the semiotic relation between the visible world of human experience and the invisible world of the spirit" (97). Language itself becomes the measure for this "semiotic relation," and Clark ranges from Edward Taylor's figures—which function as symbolic "crevices," glimpses of hope temporally suspended between the Incarnation and the Last Days—to John Eliot's missionary discourse on the presumed Hebraic antecedents of Amerindians—wherein the colonization of New England points to the realization of a human community "scattered in time and space" after Babel but symbolically restored through the " 'pure Language' of divinity" (111, 112). Clark offers a distinctive reading of Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World. Focusing on eschatology rather than politics, he finds the text structured by Mather's reading of signs within the witchcraft crisis. In a "deliberate effort to turn the discourse of millennialism inside out...