American Literature and the New Puritan Studies ed. by Bryce Traister (review)

The essays collected in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies are mostly thought-provoking and insightful, presenting a fresh direction for Puritan studies as a multi-faceted, transnational subject grounded in the under-explored data of its material culture. As the editor Bryce Traister indicates in his informative introduction, the collection 'assumes a pragmatic view' of various experiences that had been hitherto characterized as separate categories of secular and religious.

The transnational evaluation of the religious and the political is convincing in the opening essay by Paul Downes. Downes shows how Puritan thinking served as a philosophical riposte to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, suggesting that 'The Puritan sovereign … "authors" his subjects' obedience (their faith in him) via grace, but the Hobbesian sovereign is "authored" into being by the subjects it represents and for whom it will voice the law of the commonwealth'. While Hobbes wanted to strengthen the social order by maintaining a radical distance between God and the people, the Puritans set the groundwork for the American flavour of the covenant of grace—namely, an egalitarian depravity, spiritual election, and an attachment to idealized sovereigns. This served as a challenge to the old orders of religious and political power that kept godliness away from the people (which, Hobbes predicted, would lead to self-destruction). As Margaret Atwood has emphasized, the word 'puritan' means reformist—not suppressor. They saw themselves as revolutionaries.

Another intriguing feature of the collection is its multi-disciplinary approach, and its accessibility. Nan Goodman's essay focuses on a little-explored subject of Increase Mather's interest in the radical rabbi Sabbatai Sevi, showing how the religious toleration of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire had a direct influence on Mather's political thinking. Mather believed that the Puritans were heirs to the Jews. His 1669 sermon The Mystery of Israel's Salvation saw this failed messianic figure of Sevi not for his particular—and peculiar—story, but rather for his symbolism suggesting 'conditions that allowed the Jews to carve out a singular identity for themselves in a multi-ethnic space'. This reveals a more creative political vision of assimilation in Puritan society than had been previously acknowledged.

One of the high points of the collection focuses on mirth, with Michael Schuldiner's essay on the Boston clergyman Benjamin Colman's strategies of reforming Brattle Street Church at the end of the seventeenth century. His Manifesto of 1699 elucidated new policies on communion, female franchise (of electing clergy), and mirth, all while making the application for church membership more inclusive. These reforms came from his exposure to Enlightenment thinking at Harvard College, where William Brattle and John Leverett were influencing young ministers-in-training by following the likes of Descartes, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. Espousing the controversial idea of enlightened laughter, Colman and his followers thought mirth was the proper gratitude for divine grace, as against the prevailing gloom of his Puritan ancestors.

Linda M. Johnson's art-historical examination of Increase Mather's portrait, painted in London by Jan van der Spriett, acutely navigates between a convincing analysis of the portrait's relation to depictions of other prominent Englishmen of the time as well as Mather's writings that advocated for the restoration of the Massachusetts Charter, which had been revoked after the defeat of James II. Mather's careful self-presentation in the painting emphasizes at once his selfless, Christ-like devotion to his flock and his sumptuous, cosmopolitan stature as the leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This seemingly contradictory—or at least cagy—stance coincides with Mather's commentary on Ecclesiastes regarding the vanity of all earthy endeavours—the text of which appears in the portrait. The tension in Mather's portrait between the desire for self-fashioning—that is, power, wealth, and independence—and the posture of self-negating religiosity remains a powerful paradox in much of American society.

Betty Booth Donohue's analysis...