What do you think?
Rate this book
A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America
A Loss of Mastery is an essay on Puritan history in early America. By examining the major historical works of leading Puritans - Williiam Bradford, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards - the book reveals the historical and philosophical preconceptions, as well as the intellectual style, of these writers. Schooled in the Augustinian tradition, they thought of history as static and subservient to theology, as a chronicle of the plausible, familiar, and dramatic.
As a European historian, Gay brings an added perspective to his subject. In a series of illuminating comparisons, he contrasts the thinking of the Puritan historians with the dynamic and critical historiography of the Renaissance humanists. Although the humanistic assessment of historical causation was later challenged, we recognize the origins of the modern in the Renaissance view that man alone makes his own fate.
In the hands of the Puritans, however, history becomes an account of a people who had uprooted themselves not to discover, but to protect or even justify, their identity. Bradford's work was part of a Protestant campaign to capture the Augustinian past by establishing the historical credentials of the Reformation; Mather reduced critical moments in Puritan society to a series of personal crises; and Edwards' history made religious propaganda by arousing awed memories of a religious myth. Ultimately, the failure of their historical writings reflects the larger fajlure of the Puritan mission in the New World.
In the light of the appreciative rediscovery of American Puritanism by the 'Harvard historians' - Samuel Eliot Morison, Kenneth Murdock, and Perry Miller - Gay's thesis must be controversial. This controversy is perhaps best exemplified in Gay's concluding bibliographical essay - a penetrating discussion of the historians of American Puritanism, both those with whom he agrees and those with whom he disagrees.
A Loss of Mastery is an expanded version of the Jefferson Memorial Lectures given at the University of California at Berkeley in April, 1966.
As a European historian, Gay brings an added perspective to his subject. In a series of illuminating comparisons, he contrasts the thinking of the Puritan historians with the dynamic and critical historiography of the Renaissance humanists. Although the humanistic assessment of historical causation was later challenged, we recognize the origins of the modern in the Renaissance view that man alone makes his own fate.
In the hands of the Puritans, however, history becomes an account of a people who had uprooted themselves not to discover, but to protect or even justify, their identity. Bradford's work was part of a Protestant campaign to capture the Augustinian past by establishing the historical credentials of the Reformation; Mather reduced critical moments in Puritan society to a series of personal crises; and Edwards' history made religious propaganda by arousing awed memories of a religious myth. Ultimately, the failure of their historical writings reflects the larger fajlure of the Puritan mission in the New World.
In the light of the appreciative rediscovery of American Puritanism by the 'Harvard historians' - Samuel Eliot Morison, Kenneth Murdock, and Perry Miller - Gay's thesis must be controversial. This controversy is perhaps best exemplified in Gay's concluding bibliographical essay - a penetrating discussion of the historians of American Puritanism, both those with whom he agrees and those with whom he disagrees.
A Loss of Mastery is an expanded version of the Jefferson Memorial Lectures given at the University of California at Berkeley in April, 1966.
176 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1966
22 people want to read
About the author
Peter Gay
150 books155 followersPeter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 17, 2021
A delightful hidden gem; it covers - briefly - three Puritan Historians in rough chronological order: William Bradford, Cotton Mather, and finally Jonathan Edwards. It marked, in some ways, the beginning of written history in the colonies as well as the gradual end of a Christian-centric interpretation of that history which was modeled on Augustine and his City of God. Well worth a read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review