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

When thoughts turn to Puritans in America, they often still go one of two ways. In the popular imagination, they tend to be either a starting point for the view of America as the shining beacon for all the world to see and imitate or the stoic, repressive persecutors of all things even slightly different. Thankfully, recent scholarship, such as that by David Hall and Michael Winship, has demonstrated many of the shortcomings of both of these extreme ways of imagining America's Puritans. By reevaluating the "Puritan origins thesis" and its tendency toward a narrative of national exceptionalism in light of new directions in current scholarship, the essays in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies map some of the exciting, potential routes forward for those interested in studying Puritans and their influences in American history, letters, and thought.

In her To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast, Rachel Wheeler posited the need "to make the Puritans strange once again" (4). Such a task seems to be one of the aims of this collection of essays. In his introduction, "The New Puritan Studies," Bryce Traister contends that this volume and the scholarship it represents "will enable and enrich rather than diminish and confine the study of American literature and culture," making "the case for considering the scholarship of the New Puritan Studies as a useful provocation to contemporary Americanist critical practice" (3). Traister's introduction to the collection is very useful not only for the way it establishes the direction of this specific volume but also for the succinct way that he sets the current stage of Puritan studies. His brief survey of the field from Perry Miller through Janice Knight and Stephen Foster to Sarah Rivett and others clearly demonstrates the continued need for the sorts of scholarship represented by these twelve essays.

The collection is divided into three parts: "Unexpected Puritans," "Puritanism's Others," and "Puritan Afterlives." Describing these parts as "broad and provisional," Traister explains the direction and scope of each part as "[part 1] a commitment to understudied or too-long buried intellectual and historical archeologies; [part 2] an engagement with social and political categories of critique, including the indigenous encounter; and, finally [part 3], an interest in the 'post-Puritan' careers of some of the key concepts we associate with the Puritan seventeenth century" (15). Within this structure, several of the essays in each part stand out as particularly provocative and useful toward such a rethinking and reframing.

Part 1 offers several fascinating essays, including one by Michael Schuldiner that tackles some of the myths about Puritans and their lack of mirth by focusing on a pamphlet written by Boston pastor Benjamin Colman. Not only does his analysis dispel some received ideas about Puritans, but Schuldiner also situates Colman, and by extension New England Puritanism, within the world of the Enlightenment and modernity. Another essay in the first part of the collection that bears some attention is Linda M. Johnson's insightful analysis of John van der Spriett's portrait of Increase Mather. In "A Pre-millenial Portrait during the Revocation of the Massachusetts Charter," Johnson examines this painting to demonstrate fairly convincingly that divines such as Increase Mather expressed a concern to self-fashion and self-promote in ways that on the surface might seem paradoxical with accepted ideas about "Puritan self-effacement" (70). Her close reading of such a material archive demonstrates at least one way forward in evaluating and reevaluating the place of American Puritans.

Part 2 focuses especially on "Others" within the bounds of Puritanism. The "Others" in question here include those groups and individuals perhaps outside the traditional pale of Puritanism, such as Native Americans and women. Rather unexpectedly, though, Jason M. Payton's "Piracy, Piety, and Providence in Cotton Mather's The Vial Poured Out upon the Sea" includes pirates as one of these outside groups, albeit in different ways. Analyzing one...