The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings

by Perry Miller (Editor), Thomas H. Johnson (Editor)

Critically acclaimed classic lets Puritans speak for themselves in crucial documents covering history, theory of state and society, religion, customs, behavior, biographies and letters, poetry, literary theory, education, science, and more. Regarded by historian Samuel Eliot Morison as "the best selection ever made of Puritan literature, point of view and culture."

Genres: History, Religion, American History, Theology

880 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller was an intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and one of the founders of what came to be known as 'American Studies'. Alfred Kazin once referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history."

In his most famous book, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), Miller adopted a cultural approach to illuminate the worldview of the Puritans, unlike previous historians who employed psychological and economic explanations of their beliefs and behavior.

At Harvard, he directed numerous PhD dissertations; among his most notable students were historians Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan. Margaret Atwood dedicated her famous book The Handmaid's Tale to Perry Miller. He had been a mentor to her at Harvard.

His major works included:

• (1933) Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650
• (1939) The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
• (1949) Jonathan Edwards
• (1953) The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
• (1953) Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition
• (1956) Errand into the Wilderness
• (1956) The American Puritans [editor]
• (1957) The American Transcendentalists, their Prose and Poetry
• (1957) The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville and the New York Literary Scene
• (1958) Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto “Lost Journal”
• (1961) The Legal Mind in America: from Independence to the Civil War
• (1965) The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War

Reviews

[Tom Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good anthology containing all genres of Puritan literature, with all works in original spellings. This copy contains no Jonathan Edwards, which is justified both chronologically and by his distance from the original Puritan ethos.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you ever run into an American who’s rigidly principled, stubbornly upright, and treats rules like sacred law, you can probably thank—or blame—**Puritanism** for that personality streak. This book is part of my ongoing quest to understand how Protestantism shaped capitalism, a curiosity sparked by Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber famously noticed that Protestant-majority countries tended to be wealthier than Catholic ones and set out to investigate what in their beliefs made the difference.

The Puritans were a strict branch of Protestantism that established a strong presence in **New England**—specifically in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Breaking away from the Anglican Church, they built an uncompromising version of Christianity in the American colonies. And because they also dominated early colonial governments, their worldview didn’t just stay in church—it became the rulebook for society.

This book explores the Puritans’ views on **society, government, and the human soul**. Since they effectively ran the early colonies, their ideas were stamped onto everyday life. It’s hard to deny that Puritan thinking helped fuel **American capitalism**. Take Increase Mather, a Boston preacher, who taught that if people fully developed their natural abilities, divine grace would surely follow. Every person, the Puritans believed, had a calling from God—a destiny that could lead to wealth or poverty. And if you were destined to prosper, you had a moral duty to work relentlessly to make it happen.

Beyond wealth, the Puritans were deeply obsessed with **order**—especially social order. They believed the world was naturally chaotic and that God’s mission was to impose structure on it. As Boston preacher Samuel Willard put it, government exists “to prevent and cure the disorders that break out among societies of men.” Anything that threatened this order was rejected, including alternative strands of Protestantism. Groups like the Methodists found little welcome in Puritan territories, reinforcing a culture that was disciplined, rigid, and allergic to dissent.

It’s worth ending with a historical twist: the Puritans founded **Harvard University**—originally Harvard College—with the sole aim of training preachers. These ministers were highly educated in Latin and Greek and freely quoted ancient philosophers. Yet for all that learning, they lived by a philosophy of **simplicity and strictness**, shaping a society that prized moral clarity over personal freedom.

Next on my reading list is The Rise of Puritanism. While this book focuses on Puritans in America, Haller traces them back to their origins in England, where they first emerged as a movement against the ritual-heavy traditions of the Church of England. To understand their mindset in the New World, I want to start where it all began—because every cultural storm has a birthplace.