Resisting Puritans

Abstract

When the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) was founded in 1804, those behind the institution thought little of the Pilgrims and Puritans. Instead, they celebrated the Dutch. Five years after opening, their grandest gala came on 4 September to commemorate the 1609 voyage of Henry Hudson. While one toast acknowledged New England that night, the rest focused heavily on New Netherlands, with a sense that the Dutch had left a larger mark on American culture.¹ Such boasting may have been merely a feature of regional pride, but the founders of the N-YHS also had a point: New York was quickly becoming central to the new US. Its past should be known. The Dutch who colonized and occupied that region often shared Calvinist theologies with the Puritans, but they brought a very different international context to the scene, and their earliest settlements were more diverse and various than the relatively homogenous New England town.

These days the early Dutch are not much discussed in early American literature.² The toasts of the N-YHS in 1809 noted Wauter Van Twiller, Peter Stuyvesant, Joris Janse de Rapelje, Killian Van Rensselaer, and others. Yet of all the Dutch who came to America and left plenty of texts to show for it (many of which are now translated into English), only two have crept into the Norton and Heath anthologies of American literature: Adriaen van der Donck (1618–1655) and Jacob Steendam (1615–1672). Beyond these brief appearances, the Dutch disappear. Scholarship on the Haudenosaunee and Lenape flourishes, and much of that work necessarily looks to relations with the French and the Dutch. But literary scholars have mostly ignored the Dutch and their literature.³

One reason the Dutch have been neglected has been the persistent presence of Pilgrims and Puritans as the symbolic source of American culture. Starting in 1820, the Pilgrims rapidly transformed from a point of regional pride into foundational national figures—first, through the oratory of Daniel Webster, and later through textbooks written and distributed by New Englanders. By the 1830s, the Pilgrims had become the origin story of an exceptional US, a place in popular culture they still hold for some Americans today. Despite the best efforts of occasional journalists like Russell Shorto,⁴ the Dutch have been largely left behind.⁵

In recent years, however, a new narrative has arisen to challenge the prominence of the Pilgrims and subvert the myths of America associated with them. Scholars of early America have long challenged Puritan origin stories, building multiple post-exceptional models, but popular culture turns slowly. It took a “new origin story,” the 1619 Project, to draw broad attention to the long histories of structural racism and oppression that have shaped American history and culture. Billing itself as a competing origin story, it redefines how American beginnings persist in the present day. Which is perhaps why it has proved so controversial.

The 1619 Project, which centers on the arrival of the first enslaved Africans, offers a new starting place, but its project actually picks up an old American tradition: for as long as the Puritans have been posited as an opening source of American culture, Americans have resisted them, either by trying to shift the opening scene (say, to the Dutch) or by challenging their veneration. In 1887, for example, Brooks Adams (a descendant of the second president) launched a series of attacks against the Puritans in a book titled The Emancipation of Massachusetts. “Emancipation,” for Brooks Adams, meant the progress of liberty out of the prison house of Puritan origins. Each step forward required undoing the Puritan past. America begins in “fear and hatred of individual free thought,” and liberty follows from loosening the Puritan grip (4). Brooks’s brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., took the theme a step further in two books of the 1890s that had even broader reach and impact. His books helped secure him the presidency of the American Historical Association.

The Adams brothers joined a whole crowd of writers and scholars who saw nothing but oppression and persecution in the Puritans. “For without doubt,” wrote Van Wyck Brooks in America’s Coming-of-Age (1915), “the Puritan Theocracy is the all-influential fact in the history of the American mind” (8). James Truslow Adams (no relation) claimed that resistance to Puritanism mattered far more for American freedom than resistance to the British in the American Revolution. That was 1921. In 1927, Vernon Louis Parrington, an English professor, won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Main Currents in American Thought—a foundational work in the rise of American literary studies—which offered a further indictment of the Puritans. Parrington portrayed them as evil theocrats strangling both liberty and literature. A quarter-century later, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) made so much sense as a study of the McCarthy era because Americans had long imbibed an understanding of Puritanism as an oppressive regime.

While all of these scholars opposed mythic origin stories of religious liberty, none would count as what we today call the New Puritan Studies, or “post-exceptional Puritanism.” The New Puritan Studies, as Bryce Traister puts it, “challenges us to rethink not just the national exceptionalism story, but the ways in which both that storytelling and its robust critique have tended to ignore the diversity of voices, perspectives, beliefs, and ambitions that constitute the scholarship of colonial American Puritan studies today” (3). Turn-of-the-century writers like Brooks Adams, James Truslow Adams, Van Wyck Brooks, and Vernon Louis Parrington certainly offered “robust critique” of the Puritans, but none of them cared about a diversity of voices or a diversity of origins. They hated the Puritans, especially because they all saw America as arising solely from a Puritan past.

I bring up these books and their resistance to Puritanism to show both how far the field has come and how much it seems to return. On the one hand, early American scholars have vigorously pursued what Karin Wulf termed a “vast early America”—that is, all the diverse voices, perspectives, people, and cultures in and beyond Puritan New England that make up the continuing fabric of American culture, especially those which have traditionally been ignored.⁶ That project began long before (see Giles Gunn’s anthology Early American Writing from 1994, for example), but over the last two decades, it has involved shrinking (and right-sizing) the place of Puritanism within a larger early American literary landscape. Scholars now study it as one among many aspects of early America—not the only culture, nor the most important one, nor the origin of some future nation. On the other hand, “post-exceptional Puritanism” sometimes still seems haunted by the myth of Pilgrim origins. As a result, scholars and teachers—including the anthologies and teaching resources used to explain the importance of the Puritans to the next generation—sometimes turn back to the days of Adams, Brooks, and Parrington, telling a story in which the progress of liberty involves primarily an emancipation from Puritan oppressions.

The new work in early American literature, which resists American exceptionalism, nonetheless picks up and continues one important tradition from the models of Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch: the felt need to explain the US present through its early American past. That was not always considered a boon for early American studies. In fact, it was explicitly rejected as a move early Americanists should make just a few decades ago. In recent years, however, such linkages have arisen as a powerful way to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of early American studies. Early America is everywhere, I tell my students, just look around! Look, particularly, to the legacies of structural racism and other forms of oppression that remain in plain sight. The plight of the present day can often be understood best, and responded to most effectively, by seeing how inequities arise from systemic abuses of the past. Colonial oppressions laid the foundations for present injustices. Uncovering and resisting those oppressions defines the work of the moment. The more such a goal guides scholarship in early American literature, the more Puritans serve as a ripe opening scene—the beginning of the structures that must be undone.

Although I share much of that impulse, in this essay I want to challenge it, in part because of its tendency to turn back to older models in which the Puritans become flattened villains in a morality tale. To get to the challenge, though, we first need to understand how early American scholarship has retrieved linkages to the present day. Let me begin, then, by sketching five phases of post-exceptional Puritan studies, which also map onto similar movements in early American literature more generally.

Post-exceptional Puritanism

Post-exceptional Puritanism, also called the New Puritan Studies, names the overturning of early American models inherited from Miller and Bercovitch, enabling new studies not just of Puritan New England but also of early American topics and subjects more broadly. The first stage in post-exceptionalism came about by separating early American literature from its legacies and continuities into the present day. Teleological narratives were considered the very problem that had to be rejected and repaired. Where Miller and Bercovitch assumed the Puritans mattered because they explained America, post-exceptional studies cut short the long narratives and developed what I would call “Freestanding Puritanism”—a study of the period on its own terms with no attempt to link those terms to US culture now. In 1993, David Shields hailed this development, celebrating an approach to early American literature “that does away with genealogy, that does not trace the symbolic ancestry of an American mind/self/character/dream, that does not play the connect-the-dots game from Raleigh to Smith to Winthrop to Bradstreet to Mather to Franklin and Edwards to Adams and Jefferson to Wheatley and Crevecoeur to Barlow and Brown” (542). For early American literature to matter, it had to matter in its own right—not for what it led to later. Moreover, by separating early America from later developments, studies of the period could better explore and embrace the multiple contingencies of an earlier time. Things did not have to go the way they did. What paths were not taken? Setting contingency against teleology allowed foreclosed possibilities to emerge.

From this first phase of Freestanding Puritanism, scholars advanced a second: what I would call “Diverse Puritanisms.” Janice Knight’s book Orthodoxies in Massachusetts (1994) cracked open a monolithic Puritanism to reveal the divergent views housed within the term itself. Contingencies opened into tensions and disagreements. The Puritans did not, as Miller would have it, speak as a single mind. Knight explicated two powerful strains in the movement, but in her wake many more views within Puritanism emerged. Lisa Gordis’s Opening Scripture (2003) showed how radically different individual preachers could be, all under the general rubric of the same religion. Puritanism became so contested and difficult to define that some scholars have argued the term itself is useless and should be dropped. What does it really define? Many no longer capitalize the word “puritanism,” indicating that the word covers a broad and diverse movement, not a unified creed or crowd.⁷

The third overlapping phase, “Transatlantic Puritanism,” turned attention back to the imperial connections that defined so much of what happened in New England. American Puritans can never be understood without constant reference to developments in old England and beyond. Much of the public sphere of their literary output consisted, after all, of an English reading audience. That audience shaped what they produced and why they produced it. Understanding the reach of that much broader international Reformed community contextualizes the place of New England puritanism within connected developments occurring across England, Scotland, Ireland, and the continent. Thus, the two latest grand histories of Puritanism, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History and Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America by David Hall and Michael Winship, respectively, are explicitly transatlantic in their titles.⁸

The fourth phase of post-exceptional studies might be called “Settler-Colonial Puritanism.” Yes, New England Puritanism was shaped by European politics and audiences, but the Puritans of New England had even more intimate relations at hand: the Indigenous peoples whose land they occupied. Studies of Puritans and Native Americans go back many years, obviously—including debates among Francis Jennings, Alden Vaughan, James Axtell, and many others—but in literary studies, this settler colonial Puritanism has risen to prominence, especially in the last twenty years or so. In 2004, for example, Kristina Bross and Laura Stevens published foundational books on Puritan texts and Indigenous contexts.⁹ But from there, scholars have done much more work on the long-lasting settler colonial violence of Puritanism and its relation to Puritan literature, while the strong field of Indigenous Studies has done crucial work in explaining New England cultures both before and during Puritan occupation and colonial settlement.¹⁰ These days, no book on New England Puritans could afford to ignore the Indigenous context, even if concerned primarily with other matters.

The last phase of Post-Exceptional Puritanism builds on the fourth but turns back to the relevance of long histories and enduring legacies—the kind of work that preceded Freestanding Puritanism. This phase, what I would call “Persistent Puritanism,” locates early America everywhere in the present day. It builds on the 1619 Project, “Vast Early America” scholarship, and other significant ventures in early American studies to focus on the way our present world comes shaped by its deep colonial past. If a nonexceptionalist study of the Puritans originally required a separation of the Puritan past from the present—cutting off the teleological narratives—then the latest studies of Puritanism have sought to restore links under the guiding framework of a very different story. We no longer have a move from religious liberty to civil liberty or from the Puritan mind to the American self. Instead, scholars focus on the ways settler colonialism continues to shape racism, oppression, wealth gaps, land loss, issues of political sovereignty, and cultural battles in the present day. The fifth phase of post-exceptional Puritanism, in other words, involves the return of long narratives linking a study of early America to its consequences now.

These phases of development, while affecting Puritan studies, are by no means unique to scholarship on New England. They reflect moves made by the field more broadly and might be called by broader names: (1) Freestanding Early America; (2) Vast Early America; (3) Atlantic/Hemispheric/Global Early America; (4) Settler-Colonialism; and (5) Persistent Early America. Scholarship on Puritanism comes shaped by the broader field. But while work on the Puritans once centered the field, now (quite rightly) it does not. Studies of the Puritans will always continue—they were simply too important to ignore.¹¹ But how they mattered has been separated from immodest claims meant to encompass and explain all of American literature and history. Puritans contributed to American culture, but they did not set the terms for it.

Divergent Puritanisms

Because Puritanism no longer dominates early American literary studies as it once did, it has been freed to find its own path forward, exploring the contingencies and varieties of its subject under multiple methodologies. A non-exhaustive list of recent, important works in Puritan scholarship reveals divergent possibilities and great openness. Christopher Trigg traces the political consequences of Puritan eschatologies across several key figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ana Schwartz focuses on the settler colonial ramifications of a religion invested in sincerity. Nan Goodman puts Puritans in dialogue with cosmopolitanism and international law. Mark Peterson positions early Puritans in a global economic history of Boston as a city-state. David Hall offers a comprehensive account of a sprawling movement based on institutional structures, high politics, and theological disagreements. Kirsten Silva Gruesz mines one text and its history for all it can tell us about Cotton Mather and his context, setting Puritanism in an international frame and opening surprising new avenues through the biography of a single text. Putting these and other works together into a single picture of Puritan studies today would be impossible.¹²

In the midst of these new works, one path forward for literary scholars might involve deepened study of aesthetic theory. The field experienced an aesthetic turn about a decade ago that remains fruitful and could be explored further. As Matthew Pethers has recently argued, “Form” is “the term that most readily opens the possibility of viewing the ‘bounded whole’ [of early American literature] in a new way” (518).¹³ New Formalism offers the clearest approach, as Pethers notes, but scholars can also return to Puritan literature and questions of aesthetics with insights gained from post-critique, post-secularism, and historical poetics. Calvinist theology emphasized movements of the heart, which opens it especially well to these questions. Moreover, Puritans defined good reading as transformative reading. To read well meant to be changed as a person. Wendy Roberts picks up this theme in the eighteenth century with Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism (2020), her magnificent book on “revival poetics.” But what preceded the evangelical poet-ministers she so deftly analyzes? How did Puritan poetics affect more than Puritan poetry? The Puritans relied on an idea of beauty as drawing one to God, even as they feared that invention and ornamentation might distract from God. In this regard, new studies of Anne Bradstreet or Edward Taylor, those old perennial standbys of early American literature, might actually push Puritan studies forward. (Poor Edward Taylor, in particular, has been almost entirely abandoned.)

It might seem odd to find the new in the old, but I want to suggest some paths forward with Anne Bradstreet—one of the oldest subjects in Puritan literary studies—in order to show the possibilities present even in a writer so thoroughly studied by previous generations of early Americanists. Bradstreet was of course the first person from British North America to publish a book of poems. That “first” has all the problems of white settler colonialism. Jean O’Brien has elaborated the dangers of firsting and lasting in America: “firsting,” she explains, “asserts that non-Indians were the first people to erect proper institutions of a social order worthy of notice” (xii). Essentially, proclaiming a “first” erases what came before. The “first” English village on a site ignores the earlier Indigenous village, often on the very same site. In that regard, it remains important to note that Bradstreet was by no means the first poet in North America. She was simply the first person to publish a book of poetry in English. Highlighting such an accomplishment emphasizes a certain form of literacy and print production that foregrounds the material artifact of the book. That, too, contains inherent problems of English settler colonialism. A recent article on Bradstreet, by Ana Schwartz, examines in a fresh light the settler colonial dynamics of her poetics.¹⁴

Beyond her example, rich studies in book history have unfolded the material realities of Bradstreet’s achievement, opening (among many other things) how many hands were involved in the making of a single book and how little control any writer had over the product. Just as importantly, we know that Bradstreet was not some solitary poetic genius. Much of what was once thought unique fits a broader pattern of early modern women’s writing. Yet those who study early modern literature in England seldom look to Bradstreet, and those who study her writing seldom look to the wide range of her contemporaneous women writers across the sea. For all that global and transatlantic studies have done for early American literature, Bradstreet quite often remains isolated as a lone female poet from North America.

Post-secular studies pose still other possibilities. Charles Taylor’s work, A Secular Age (2007), ushered in a new era of thinking about what constitutes the religious and the secular, and what changes from early modern societies as they move into modern social imaginaries. Recent works in this movement, including Alec Ryrie’s Unbelievers (2019), take up the argument that doubt and unbelief arise most pervasively and persuasively from within. Bradstreet’s poetry, along with her prose meditations and other writings, lend themselves to a more thorough analysis of this claim, since so much anger, doubt, and resistance find their way into her work, even as her writings often, almost forcefully, resolve back into an embrace of faith. Moreover, because Bradstreet was read, received, reread, and taught ever since she first published The Tenth Muse (1650), her work serves as a nuanced test case to tell a broader story of how secularization takes shape. Those inspired by Bradstreet have sometimes been religious, sometimes not. In Bradstreet and her history of reception, therefore, scholars can find practices of faith and processes of believing that make unbelief and irreligion seem possible. Bradstreet and her many afterlives can help us understand how the “religious” defined, embraced, and made possible the “secular” through acts of faith that affirmed nonconformity and championed dissent.¹⁵

A further question about Bradstreet could involve the relation between Puritan religion and ambition. How does a religion that opposes vanity, understand, constrain, or encourage the idea of ambition and the desire to be remembered? Questions of ambition and constraint could be asked across early American literary contexts and usefully compared. Reading Bradstreet along with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, for example, I was struck again by how many times both writers talk about fame and memory. Bradstreet’s theology seems at odds with her language of fame. She praises others because their name will never be forgotten, and she clearly hopes her own memory will live in the minds of her children and grandchildren. Yet she also believes, and states explicitly, that the mind of God is all that matters. Humans die. Names fade. Nothing lasts. Being remembered by God—and in the right way—puts all other desires in their place. As she puts it at the end of “Contemplations,” the only eternal monument is the “white stone” (l.231) and the only immortality that matters is having your name engraved there. A pious sentiment, to be sure, but the rest of Bradstreet’s poetry belies it. She wants to be remembered. She desires fame. So how does that vexed territory and intense tension energize and shape her poetics? And how does it compare to the constraints or energies of literary ambition in other early American theologies, philosophies, and cultures?

Oppression and Resistance

The approaches to Puritanism remain vast and various. Yet determining how Puritanism matters these days often involves situating the Puritans in a paradigm of oppression and resistance. Uncovering forms of oppression reveals dangers and problems that persist into the present, thus illuminating ongoing injustices and inequities in American culture. Meanwhile, highlighting forms of resistance can reveal models for action that might be emulated now. Either way, the conditions that have created these inequalities call for both knowledge and response.

Oppression and resistance are vital categories of analysis both to study and to teach—not just for how they operated in early America, but also for how systemic legacies of injustice persist. New knowledge about the way Puritan merchants profited from the slave trade (see Mark Peterson), or how they enslaved Native Americans and others (see Wendy Warren), helps not only bust the myth of liberty that some Americans still associate with New England origins; it also reveals the continuing implications of settler-colonial occupation.¹⁶ While philosophical and linguistic ideas of race may have fluctuated and expanded in the period, the experience of racism on the ground was very real, as Joanna Brooks and many others have pointed out.¹⁷ Life and death hung in the balance, and the difference very often depended on categories of race. The consequences persist. This paradigm, in other words, is one way—and perhaps the easiest way—to talk about the relevance of early American texts under the guiding principle of post-exceptionalism. It offers the return of grand narratives linking early America to present realities. Such connections have provided professors a way to explain for students realities that surround them every day. The more of this the better.

Consider, for example, Ana Schwartz’s book Unmoored, which takes seriously the good intentions of Puritans, and then shows that such good intentions entailed terrible consequences both within and beyond their community. Here, a dynamic tied to one historical context has ramifications that live beyond it—not just in terms of settler-colonial legacies, but also in terms of transhistorical dynamics of thought. The book investigates complicated relations between sincerity, intentions, and consequences, and I’ll return in the end to how its theoretical modeling points a way forward for Puritan and early American scholarship.

But I also think the dominance of an oppression/resistance paradigm can lead sometimes to a view of the Puritans as one-dimensional villains—a Persistent Puritanism in which the Puritans become, somewhat paradoxically, exceptionally bad. Some of that appears in Schwartz’s book as well. The good intentions of the Puritans only make them worse. At every turn, violence ensues. Each chapter uncovers another form of persecution. Given the guiding poles of oppression and resistance, individual authors or texts or whole movements (like Puritanism) can sometimes get filed into one slot or the other: either oppressors or resisters. And as a result, each Puritan text can be subjected to the same interpretative fate: find and discuss its oppression. In other words, this paradigm has the tendency of turning the wheel back to the old days of resisting Puritans. All advances in freedom involve resisting the Puritan past.

While the paradigm can be pushed too far, for the most part, it has fostered studies, including Schwartz’s, that do important work to reconnect the past with the present. Such studies raise the question of how early American literary studies explains its own significance. And it does seem that the legacies of early America—whether real or imagined, whether mythic and storied or historical and ingrained—remain the easiest case to make. Why does a president cite a Puritan sermon? What are those statues to Anne Hutchinson all about? How is it that my children, who live within spitting distance of Cahokia, all make Wampanoag and Plymouth dioramas in their St. Louis elementary school? The questions go on and on, leading to larger queries about which of these stories are right, which are wrong, which remain to be told, and what all this reveals about American culture in the present day: early America is everywhere.

Puritan Resistance

One way forward, then, would be to ask other questions of oppression and resistance. Such terms made sense to the Puritans themselves, after all. They stood both within and against the institutional powers of their day. They saw themselves as reformers. They tested and challenged the Church of England while trying not to separate from it (as the Pilgrims did). They opposed the King to the point of war, even beheading Charles I and eliminating the monarchy. Yet in their resistance, thousands of Puritans left England to occupy Indigenous lands. In other words, resistance and oppression can go hand in hand, and both aspects persist. Recovering the resistance of the Puritans themselves may add useful complexity to the present state of the field, particularly on the American side of the Atlantic.

Consider the Charter of 1629, in which Puritans found a loophole and turned it to their use. Like other English colonies, Massachusetts Bay had been established as a company, a money-making venture, with the assumption that its board would meet in London. But the King never specified where the board should meet. When Puritans saw the lacuna, they sold their goods and set sail with the charter, realizing that they could establish the board abroad. In effect, the board of the company became the government of a colony with new forms of self-governance the King could not prevent.

This was a defiant act. When the King realized what had happened, he demanded the charter’s return. Puritans hemmed and hawed and refused to return it. King Charles threatened to send a warship, and Puritans prepared to defend themselves, but Charles became distracted by more pressing problems, and nothing happened. Meanwhile, in the hubbub about the charter, townspeople demanded to see it. And when they read its terms and understood how it had been reinterpreted, they demanded their own rights as freemen—according to the terms of the charter itself—and so extended their own vote and power.

The 1629 Charter, in other words, is one of the most important, underexamined, and least-taught texts in the Puritan literary canon. Acts of resistance related to the charter, all in the name of various kinds of self-rule, can be further unfolded. After all, the uses of the charter all came about through hermeneutic methods that drastically altered personal conditions. Yet equally important are the ramifications of such readings and resistances. For the self-sovereignty claimed by New England Puritans through their clever usage of the charter threatened and undermined the sovereignty of others. Over the next decade, nearly 20,000 English arrived in New England. White settler colonialism emerged through Puritan expansions of self-governance and their resistance to the King—and both of those arose from careful acts of reading and interpretation.

The fatal and ill consequences of white settler colonialism remain ever-present. But the consequences of self-rule that followed from the initial charter also persist, including the repeated demands by townspeople for greater representation in the seat of government, the invention of a bicameral legislature to give weight to the views of the common people, and the ability to throw out governors who abused their power. Even John Winthrop found himself deposed when townspeople concluded that he had overstepped his bounds. Scholars and teachers of the Puritans should certainly today be foregrounding the effects of white settler colonialism; they might also want to emphasize that the Puritans’ greatest political fear was “arbitrary rule”—their term for authoritarianism. Sufficient regulation or constraint of governing authorities animated their political theories. As Adrian Weimer explains in a recent prize-winning book, A Constitutional Culture (2023), such a fear of “arbitrary rule” led to constitutional strengths. “Equipped with a ready vocabulary for criticizing arbitrary rule,” Weimer explains, the Puritan colonists of New England went on “to plan, enact, and justify certain lines the crown should not cross” (3). The legacies of white settler colonialism and Puritan experiments in new forms of self-government—sometimes linked in a single text—both matter.

The dynamics of oppression and resistance cut multiple ways, then. Anne Hutchinson, for example, is considered a quintessential case of resistance against the Puritan patriarchy. She was. Yet at trial, she justified her behavior by invoking Calvinist resistance theory and linking herself to the same tradition as those Puritan patriarchs—a tradition little discussed in early American literature. Robert Kingdon offers an overview of its earlier years, but suffice to say that the underlying principle was summarized by Hutchinson herself: one’s ultimate allegiance must be given to God, not man. When human authorities command disobedience of God’s law, subjects must resist.¹⁸ As Elizabeth Dillon has summarized, “Puritan doctrine contained within it terms that authorized moral opposition to state power” (56). Or to put it differently: Hutchinson is never more Puritan than we she resists fellow Puritans.

The paradigm of resistance and oppression remains fruitful for Puritan scholarship, but more could be done to reveal how that very paradigm was practiced and embraced by the Puritans themselves and what lasting consequences ensued. Theories of individual conscience and resistance to governing authorities remain live questions today. Oppression was a concept they understood. It was also a word they used—to describe the price gouging of the rich merchant Robert Keayne, for example, whom they roundly punished. Examining how the Puritans made sense of oppression and resistance, how they understood the reach and limits of reform, how they tried to galvanize or restrain resistance, and what justifications they provided in each case all provide a useful, and different, way to talk about the Puritans through the paradigm of oppression and resistance. And of course, as in the case of the charter, their own forms of resistance could entail the oppression of others. A double-edged analysis of resistance and oppression—how one Puritan act or text could embody both aspects—allows scholars and teachers to embrace the five phases of post-exceptional Puritanism while adding nuance to the understanding of Puritanism itself.

Where does that leave Puritan studies today? Free to do whatever it pleases, but not free to ignore what post-exceptional studies have brought to light. Insofar as Persistent Puritanism joins other efforts across early American literature to “make the most persuasive case for the relationship between the cultural past and the cultural present” as Pethers puts it, I encourage colleagues to see ever-greater depth and dynamics and more flexibility in the models used to approach Puritan studies (522). Understanding Puritans’ opposition to arbitrary rule, or fleshing out their constitutional culture and its consequences, does not negate the ill effects of their settler colonialism. Instead, it shows how early American cultures had multiple ramifications, and how often one and the same act (or text) could lead to radically different long-term effects. We have come far enough from Miller and Bercovitch to resist American exceptionalism, and far enough as well to resist “The Emancipation of Massachusetts.” Beyond the Puritans, the cultures of “Vast Early America” remain wide open, as the example of the Dutch makes clear. Literature abounds and beckons for scholars to take it up, read it, and make sense of it for the broader field.

At present, historical legacies and links to the present day seem the strongest way to explain the importance of early American studies, but that is not the only way. A different, useful form of significance emerges as well in the work of Schwartz. She looks not just to persistent legacies, but also to abiding questions that link one era to another through theoretical models. Such questions (of governance, aesthetics, resistance, equity, justice, self-knowledge, and much more) can matter even when, or especially when, a past culture addresses the same question but in a very different light. Schwartz examines the ill consequences of desiring ultimate sincerity and demanding its expression in public. Her book theorizes relations between intention, sincerity, sympathy, and cruelty in ways that come from the particularity of a Puritan context but apply more broadly. She shows how the relevance of early American studies lies not just in the persistence of the past (early America is everywhere!), but also in its strangeness, and her theoretical models build connections through basic questions and longings, such as the desire for stability and self-knowledge. The past can still be approached usefully as a foreign country—in all its oddity and complexity—while also being treated as precursor to the present day.

Abram Van Engen is the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St Louis. He works on religion and literature in American culture, and his books include City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (2020).

Footnotes

Works Cited