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The New England Mind
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
In The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, as well as successor The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, Perry Miller asserts a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system.
542 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1939
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697 people want to read
About the author
Perry Miller
63 books23 followersPerry 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
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
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July 5, 2020
Someone on Perry Miller’s Wikipedia entry dug up a quote from an obscure essay about another topic altogether to claim that “the dark conflicts of the Puritan mind eroded his own mental stability.” Miller drank himself to death in 1963, not yet sixty years old, and the event was hailed as a major loss to American intellectual history. He produced many books but “The New England Mind,” his two volume work on the intellectual world of the Puritan settlers, probably stands as his magnum opus.
Miller’s work here has the thoroughgoingness of the Puritan, and his radicality, in the sense of getting to the root of things. He spends hundreds of pages on foundation work, most notably in the first volume, where he excavates the logical, scholastic framework of the thinking of the first generation of Puritan leaders in New England. We hear a lot about the medieval scholastic tradition, with which the Puritans tinkered but did not dispense with until everyone else did, and a whole lot about Peter Ramus, the French Huguenot logician who sought to displace Aristotle as king shit logician man. As you might be able to tell from my levity, these chapters took some digesting on my part, but the spadework was spectacular.
The picture of the Puritans that emerges from the first volume is that of a deeply dour kind of cosmic optimist. They finagled their way out of the terrible strictures of Calvinism through the establishment of the Covenant of Grace. This was the idea that God, despite being empowered to and justified in arbitrarily damning and saving whoever He pleases, condescends to make a pact with his believers in the same way men of business (as so many Puritans were) make pacts amongst themselves. Faith would bring salvation, not just for individuals but for the community — the new “city upon the hill” of New England — as a whole. The terms of the pact were to be regulated by the (Congregational) church- you couldn’t just go off and make the deal on your own. This way, Miller tells us, the Puritans navigated between the Scylla of Arminianism (the idea that good works could bring about salvation, more or less, a Calvinist no-no) and the Charybdis of Antinomianism, the idea that salvation was entirely interior, an inner light that redeemed the person totally without need of structures.
My image of the Puritan covenant-based social/theological/intellectual order as depicted by Miller is that of a powerful but delicate engine, capable of great feats of world-building but needing constant tinkering to keep from going off kilter. This helps explain why the Puritan fathers came down so hard on antinomians like Anne Hutchinson, who they saw as threatening the colony with spiritual and hence general anarchy (which some scholars of Puritanism, like Edmund Morgan, came to see as essentially correct in a way Miller avoids). Covenant theology ran into a generational problem- what happens when the children of “saints” i.e. full church members don’t have the right kind of conversion experience, the right kind of faith to become full church members themselves? This was tied in to the question of infant baptism, a serious issue in seventeenth century Protestantism.
Miller leads off the second book with the New England solution to this issue, the Half-Way Covenant. This allowed people to baptize their kids as partial members of the church but not recipients of the full communion. As the name implies, this didn’t really satisfy anybody. People either wanted to stick with the old system, babies be damned (literally?) or, as eventually came to pass on the Connecticut Valley frontier, simply let all adults who professed faith and weren’t notorious sinners take communion. Above and beyond the deeply felt theological issues here, there were political issues at work. The church was the center of the New England town (hence those pretty, plain white frame churches around so many New England town greens), everyone paid to maintain it and magistrates enforced its rules, even once the British government twisted the arms of Massachusetts and Connecticut to allow other sects to worship. At first, the likes of John Winthrop, Increase Mather, and other big names in Puritanism were perfectly fine with a minority of “saints” lording it over everyone else in town. Time eroded that system and their confidence.
Miller might have been the origin of the idea of the Half-Way Covenant as the beginning of the decline of Puritanism… and the beginning of New England looking like America, as he conceived it. The rest of Volume II is a long series of defeats for Puritan orthodoxy, but it’s not as simple as that. In many respects, these defeats — ranging from the loss of control over social hierarchies as capitalism developed to introductions of new models of physics — were encouraged by the beliefs of the Puritan fathers themselves, no strangers to deal-making or broad liberal educations that eventually led to acceptance of a recognizably “modern” economics and science. Miller, while protective of the Puritan genius from its many irreverent critics, doesn’t see the declension away from Puritanism as a bad or good thing in and of itself. It’s part of the construction of an American way that would include Puritan ideas in its DNA but would be its own thing.
For a long time, many Americans saw the Puritans as father figures. For the “filiopietistic” strand of American historiography in the nineteenth century, this meant enshrining them as demigods of wisdom. For the irreverent writers of the early twentieth century, ranging from progressive historians to H.L. Mencken, the Puritans were bad dads- “abusive” wasn’t the language they would’ve used, but certainly to be looked at with scorn. For Miller and the other American Studies writers in midcentury, they had a complex, conflicted — dare I say psychoanalytic — approach to the Puritans-as-father, an appreciation but also an ironic distance (which makes sense- this was the first generation of American university scholars to involve many Jews and other non-WASPs) that seems distant from our own sensibility… but made for some great scholarship. Thick, dense, at times exhausting along with being exhaustive (it reminded me of Pocock’s “The Machiavellian Moment,” both for good and for I’ll), “The New England Mind,” like the achievements of the Puritans, is an impressive piece of work from a perspective that can only now be approached from outside. *****
Miller’s work here has the thoroughgoingness of the Puritan, and his radicality, in the sense of getting to the root of things. He spends hundreds of pages on foundation work, most notably in the first volume, where he excavates the logical, scholastic framework of the thinking of the first generation of Puritan leaders in New England. We hear a lot about the medieval scholastic tradition, with which the Puritans tinkered but did not dispense with until everyone else did, and a whole lot about Peter Ramus, the French Huguenot logician who sought to displace Aristotle as king shit logician man. As you might be able to tell from my levity, these chapters took some digesting on my part, but the spadework was spectacular.
The picture of the Puritans that emerges from the first volume is that of a deeply dour kind of cosmic optimist. They finagled their way out of the terrible strictures of Calvinism through the establishment of the Covenant of Grace. This was the idea that God, despite being empowered to and justified in arbitrarily damning and saving whoever He pleases, condescends to make a pact with his believers in the same way men of business (as so many Puritans were) make pacts amongst themselves. Faith would bring salvation, not just for individuals but for the community — the new “city upon the hill” of New England — as a whole. The terms of the pact were to be regulated by the (Congregational) church- you couldn’t just go off and make the deal on your own. This way, Miller tells us, the Puritans navigated between the Scylla of Arminianism (the idea that good works could bring about salvation, more or less, a Calvinist no-no) and the Charybdis of Antinomianism, the idea that salvation was entirely interior, an inner light that redeemed the person totally without need of structures.
My image of the Puritan covenant-based social/theological/intellectual order as depicted by Miller is that of a powerful but delicate engine, capable of great feats of world-building but needing constant tinkering to keep from going off kilter. This helps explain why the Puritan fathers came down so hard on antinomians like Anne Hutchinson, who they saw as threatening the colony with spiritual and hence general anarchy (which some scholars of Puritanism, like Edmund Morgan, came to see as essentially correct in a way Miller avoids). Covenant theology ran into a generational problem- what happens when the children of “saints” i.e. full church members don’t have the right kind of conversion experience, the right kind of faith to become full church members themselves? This was tied in to the question of infant baptism, a serious issue in seventeenth century Protestantism.
Miller leads off the second book with the New England solution to this issue, the Half-Way Covenant. This allowed people to baptize their kids as partial members of the church but not recipients of the full communion. As the name implies, this didn’t really satisfy anybody. People either wanted to stick with the old system, babies be damned (literally?) or, as eventually came to pass on the Connecticut Valley frontier, simply let all adults who professed faith and weren’t notorious sinners take communion. Above and beyond the deeply felt theological issues here, there were political issues at work. The church was the center of the New England town (hence those pretty, plain white frame churches around so many New England town greens), everyone paid to maintain it and magistrates enforced its rules, even once the British government twisted the arms of Massachusetts and Connecticut to allow other sects to worship. At first, the likes of John Winthrop, Increase Mather, and other big names in Puritanism were perfectly fine with a minority of “saints” lording it over everyone else in town. Time eroded that system and their confidence.
Miller might have been the origin of the idea of the Half-Way Covenant as the beginning of the decline of Puritanism… and the beginning of New England looking like America, as he conceived it. The rest of Volume II is a long series of defeats for Puritan orthodoxy, but it’s not as simple as that. In many respects, these defeats — ranging from the loss of control over social hierarchies as capitalism developed to introductions of new models of physics — were encouraged by the beliefs of the Puritan fathers themselves, no strangers to deal-making or broad liberal educations that eventually led to acceptance of a recognizably “modern” economics and science. Miller, while protective of the Puritan genius from its many irreverent critics, doesn’t see the declension away from Puritanism as a bad or good thing in and of itself. It’s part of the construction of an American way that would include Puritan ideas in its DNA but would be its own thing.
For a long time, many Americans saw the Puritans as father figures. For the “filiopietistic” strand of American historiography in the nineteenth century, this meant enshrining them as demigods of wisdom. For the irreverent writers of the early twentieth century, ranging from progressive historians to H.L. Mencken, the Puritans were bad dads- “abusive” wasn’t the language they would’ve used, but certainly to be looked at with scorn. For Miller and the other American Studies writers in midcentury, they had a complex, conflicted — dare I say psychoanalytic — approach to the Puritans-as-father, an appreciation but also an ironic distance (which makes sense- this was the first generation of American university scholars to involve many Jews and other non-WASPs) that seems distant from our own sensibility… but made for some great scholarship. Thick, dense, at times exhausting along with being exhaustive (it reminded me of Pocock’s “The Machiavellian Moment,” both for good and for I’ll), “The New England Mind,” like the achievements of the Puritans, is an impressive piece of work from a perspective that can only now be approached from outside. *****
February 2, 2022
One reads Perry Miller for the same reasons one reads Edward Gibbon: the delightful prose and the breathtaking scope of his topic. Never go to Miller for accurate doctrine. He gets much of it wrong. That might not be accurate, though. Miller has read the primary sources, and there are many of them. How well he understood them is another question.
Peter Ramus
Many Puritans considered him as dying “equally for the cause of logic and of Christ” (Miller 117). Missionaries would translate Ramus and condense him down so the Native Americans could read him alongside the Bible.
Aristotelian systems divided the whole of logic into three parts: simple terms, proposition, and discourse (122ff). A simple term contains the predicable. The key is that its logic didn’t focus on method so much as learning the predicables.
To Ramus most of this was unnecessary memory work and didn’t actually train the student to use systems and methods. By focusing more on method than memorizing predicables, a Ramist was able to show how the terms are interconnected, something Aristotelians could not always do.
Logic is divided into invention and judgment. “Invention is the part in which are arranged individual terms, the concepts, the arguments or the reasons, with which discourses are constructed; in judgment are contained the methods for putting arguments together”(128).
Arguments can be either artificial or inartificial. An artificial argument is the facts as they are observable (e.g., fire causes heat). The argument is embedded in the thing itself. An inartificial argument is one whose cause is not immediately apparent.
The most important point is that the syllogism serves the axiom, not the other way around. This removes the tendency, probably common among scholastics, to reduce everything to syllogisms. In other words, “judgment is made immediately from axiom, mediately from syllogism” (135).
Ramus went even further. He simplified the syllogism “into two modes, which he called the simple and composite” (136). A simple syllogism is one of the standard three figures. A composite is something like a hypothetical or disjunctive syllogism. Whereas Aristotle emphasized the square of opposition, Ramus introduced the opposition in a catalog of arguments.
Ames: “Contradiction in the composite syllogism always ought to divide the true from the false” (138).
“Method proceeds from universals to singulars.”
Miller suggests that the division between Aristotelians and Ramists is like the one between nominalists and realists, with the former seeing logic as a product of the mind (146).
Invention: an act of faculty intelligence performed according to the law of truth.
Ramism ran headlong into a problem: how can one really assert the identity between arguments and things (155)? They denied that concepts were merely mental and subjective, which would seem to be nominalism. Both the medieval nominalists and the Puritans (at least as Miller reads them) believed in an almighty, albeit arbitrary God. By putting rationality in the nature of things, Ramus allowed the Puritans a God without the chaos.
Ames illustrated how art (i.e., the rule of making and governing things to their ends) moves from God to man: the mind of God → enacted by God → clothed with objects and forms → extracted from objects by the human mind.
While he was a Ramist, much of William Ames’ theology is quite Thomist. He asserted divine ideas or “platformes” in the mind of God. The idea of a thing preexists in the mind of God. Especially as relates to “art,” these divine ideas are the radii of divine wisdom (167).
“Affections” are “the instruments of the will as it embraces or refuses a thing” (253).
Ramus didn’t so much as attack Aristotle on rhetoric; he simply got rid of the unnecessary parts. Ramus’s students, especially ministers of the Word, saw that forcing a sermon to fit the grid of “praecisio, significatio, extenuatiom digressio, progressio, regressio, iteratio, dubiatio” was useless, if not actually impossible (315). Ramus argued that the logical form (which the student would have already covered in the dialectic) could carry the weight of the “rhetorical” aspect. Ramus said a student was better off imitating Cicero than trying to reproduce an Aristotelian manual.
This view on rhetoric led quite naturally to the “plain style” of Puritan preaching. By plain style they didn’t mean “ignorant.” They meant setting forth the “reasons” and “use” of a text.
The Covenant of Grace
Here is where Miller gets in trouble. He writes, “Accordingly, between 1600 and 1650, English Puritans were compelled, in order to preserve the truths already known, to add to their theology at least one that hitherto had not already been known, or at least not emphasized, the doctrine of the Covenant of Grace” (366). This statement is false on every level.
Maybe he isn’t saying that, though. A few pages later, he mentions that the covenant of grace was in earlier Reformers. What he suggests, I think, is that the Covenant of Grace took on a new practicality among the New England Puritans who also happened to be Ramist, Federalist, and Congregationalist all at once (374).
The problem is not that Miller hasn’t read the sources. I dare say few have read New England Puritanism as intensely as he did. He limits his vision, though. He is completely unaware of any developments/origins of covenant theology outside of North America and some aspects of Perkins and Ames.
Building upon this covenant idea, the final two chapters trace the dangers of applying the covenant of grace to a church covenant and civil society. It's easy to critique New England on this point, but one must also exercise caution in interpreting Miller, as he has not always done the best job on covenant theology.
Peter Ramus
Many Puritans considered him as dying “equally for the cause of logic and of Christ” (Miller 117). Missionaries would translate Ramus and condense him down so the Native Americans could read him alongside the Bible.
Aristotelian systems divided the whole of logic into three parts: simple terms, proposition, and discourse (122ff). A simple term contains the predicable. The key is that its logic didn’t focus on method so much as learning the predicables.
To Ramus most of this was unnecessary memory work and didn’t actually train the student to use systems and methods. By focusing more on method than memorizing predicables, a Ramist was able to show how the terms are interconnected, something Aristotelians could not always do.
Logic is divided into invention and judgment. “Invention is the part in which are arranged individual terms, the concepts, the arguments or the reasons, with which discourses are constructed; in judgment are contained the methods for putting arguments together”(128).
Arguments can be either artificial or inartificial. An artificial argument is the facts as they are observable (e.g., fire causes heat). The argument is embedded in the thing itself. An inartificial argument is one whose cause is not immediately apparent.
The most important point is that the syllogism serves the axiom, not the other way around. This removes the tendency, probably common among scholastics, to reduce everything to syllogisms. In other words, “judgment is made immediately from axiom, mediately from syllogism” (135).
Ramus went even further. He simplified the syllogism “into two modes, which he called the simple and composite” (136). A simple syllogism is one of the standard three figures. A composite is something like a hypothetical or disjunctive syllogism. Whereas Aristotle emphasized the square of opposition, Ramus introduced the opposition in a catalog of arguments.
Ames: “Contradiction in the composite syllogism always ought to divide the true from the false” (138).
“Method proceeds from universals to singulars.”
Miller suggests that the division between Aristotelians and Ramists is like the one between nominalists and realists, with the former seeing logic as a product of the mind (146).
Invention: an act of faculty intelligence performed according to the law of truth.
Ramism ran headlong into a problem: how can one really assert the identity between arguments and things (155)? They denied that concepts were merely mental and subjective, which would seem to be nominalism. Both the medieval nominalists and the Puritans (at least as Miller reads them) believed in an almighty, albeit arbitrary God. By putting rationality in the nature of things, Ramus allowed the Puritans a God without the chaos.
Ames illustrated how art (i.e., the rule of making and governing things to their ends) moves from God to man: the mind of God → enacted by God → clothed with objects and forms → extracted from objects by the human mind.
While he was a Ramist, much of William Ames’ theology is quite Thomist. He asserted divine ideas or “platformes” in the mind of God. The idea of a thing preexists in the mind of God. Especially as relates to “art,” these divine ideas are the radii of divine wisdom (167).
“Affections” are “the instruments of the will as it embraces or refuses a thing” (253).
Ramus didn’t so much as attack Aristotle on rhetoric; he simply got rid of the unnecessary parts. Ramus’s students, especially ministers of the Word, saw that forcing a sermon to fit the grid of “praecisio, significatio, extenuatiom digressio, progressio, regressio, iteratio, dubiatio” was useless, if not actually impossible (315). Ramus argued that the logical form (which the student would have already covered in the dialectic) could carry the weight of the “rhetorical” aspect. Ramus said a student was better off imitating Cicero than trying to reproduce an Aristotelian manual.
This view on rhetoric led quite naturally to the “plain style” of Puritan preaching. By plain style they didn’t mean “ignorant.” They meant setting forth the “reasons” and “use” of a text.
The Covenant of Grace
Here is where Miller gets in trouble. He writes, “Accordingly, between 1600 and 1650, English Puritans were compelled, in order to preserve the truths already known, to add to their theology at least one that hitherto had not already been known, or at least not emphasized, the doctrine of the Covenant of Grace” (366). This statement is false on every level.
Maybe he isn’t saying that, though. A few pages later, he mentions that the covenant of grace was in earlier Reformers. What he suggests, I think, is that the Covenant of Grace took on a new practicality among the New England Puritans who also happened to be Ramist, Federalist, and Congregationalist all at once (374).
The problem is not that Miller hasn’t read the sources. I dare say few have read New England Puritanism as intensely as he did. He limits his vision, though. He is completely unaware of any developments/origins of covenant theology outside of North America and some aspects of Perkins and Ames.
Building upon this covenant idea, the final two chapters trace the dangers of applying the covenant of grace to a church covenant and civil society. It's easy to critique New England on this point, but one must also exercise caution in interpreting Miller, as he has not always done the best job on covenant theology.
November 10, 2011
Oh. My. I'm clearly not a fan of Mr. Miller's writing. This book was an absolute torture to get through, and I only did it for my friends. I hope they know I love them. :)
June 17, 2020
Chapter one is brilliant - it goes down from there . . . .
February 4, 2026
4 ⭐️ for information, 2-3 ⭐️ for enjoyment
February 14, 2018
How much better than multiple volumes of historiographical bafflegab by evangelicals edited by D. G. Hart is one volume of history by Perry Miller. They will perish, but Perry Miller will always have to be consulted.
This is a cogent, careful, ingenious, devastating, irascible, symphonic, amazing volume. Even with the palpably dated portions, the structure stands majestic, like a tremendous tower that has withstood a siege in which every other surrounding edifice has been laid low. It is one of the great works of American historiography.
What Perry Miller has is: good insight, thorough research, and trained skepticism. He admires the puritans, but not too much, and he does not fail to clearly identify their failure. While remaining skeptical of their claims, he sifts through them carefully, evaluates them seriously, thus exposing hidden assumptions and agendas. He is brilliant in pointing out that while they believed that the church must be ordered from the obvious teaching of Scripture, what constituted a church in independent, Congregationalist polity, a local church covenant, was not, in fact, obviously drawn from Scripture. And his grasp of human weakness helps him see what is often overlooked. There are things for which Miller ought to be corrected. He did not, for example, always read as thoroughly in the sources of the sources of the Puritans as he did in the Puritans themselves. He apparently did not have or did not find reliable information on crucial fields outside of his own field of expertise. For all that, there are many things that need no correction in his book, eighty years later. Not being a Christian, he had no need to whitewash the Puritans in the name of appearing charitable; his view was more disinterested. His book remains a standard text on the New England mind, and it bids fair, the way a classic work does, to remain.
This is a cogent, careful, ingenious, devastating, irascible, symphonic, amazing volume. Even with the palpably dated portions, the structure stands majestic, like a tremendous tower that has withstood a siege in which every other surrounding edifice has been laid low. It is one of the great works of American historiography.
What Perry Miller has is: good insight, thorough research, and trained skepticism. He admires the puritans, but not too much, and he does not fail to clearly identify their failure. While remaining skeptical of their claims, he sifts through them carefully, evaluates them seriously, thus exposing hidden assumptions and agendas. He is brilliant in pointing out that while they believed that the church must be ordered from the obvious teaching of Scripture, what constituted a church in independent, Congregationalist polity, a local church covenant, was not, in fact, obviously drawn from Scripture. And his grasp of human weakness helps him see what is often overlooked. There are things for which Miller ought to be corrected. He did not, for example, always read as thoroughly in the sources of the sources of the Puritans as he did in the Puritans themselves. He apparently did not have or did not find reliable information on crucial fields outside of his own field of expertise. For all that, there are many things that need no correction in his book, eighty years later. Not being a Christian, he had no need to whitewash the Puritans in the name of appearing charitable; his view was more disinterested. His book remains a standard text on the New England mind, and it bids fair, the way a classic work does, to remain.
May 31, 2023
A difficulty we all have with history is our inability to climb into the mindset of past times, so full are we of present ideas. In this quite lengthy, very impressive and quite readable display of expertise, Perry Miller comes as close as the reader can hope to come to understanding the early 1600's in New England, the land of the Puritans.
The Puritans were part of the Congregational branch of English Protestantism, closely associated with Calvinism, who fled the turbulent political climate of England that would result in the English civil war between royalists and parliamentarians (1642-1651). All of Europe was in an uproar as Catholics and Protestants fought to the death in the 30 years war (1614-1648) over who were the more authentic followers of of a man who preached non-violence.
Death could easily come not only from following either of the two major divisions of Christianity, but from following some sect of Protestantism unacceptable to authority. How to keep the public under control and the how authority could be legitimate were under intense debate everywhere as all yearned to bring order out of chaos. The history that informed the political thinking of the founders of the United States was in progress.
As one would expect, where authority was discussed the subject could not avoid spilling into the relationship of man to God, considered the ultimate authority. Martin Luther introducing Protestantism a century earlier had thrown open religious thought by stating that the Bible should be open to all without the Church as intermediary between the individual and the words of his creator.
But what to make of a many authored book claimed to be the word of God? As any lawyer can tell you, words can mean just about anything you want them to mean. It was well known that the ancient Greek sophists made a living training the young to take any side of an argument. It was one thing for a pope to declare doctrine for the Church, quite another to set readers of the Bible free.
Luther, taking great care to instruct new Bible readers, insisted that salvation would come through faith alone, not by good works. With Calvin came the idea of predestination, that the salvation of a soul was entirely up to God and was settled in advance. You were to be saved or not as God decided and there was nothing you could do nor know about it. Not surprisingly for this harsh reading that was hard to reconcile both with free will and with justice, there was reaction.
The Puritans were, in keeping with the times following the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient Greek ideas, very fond of reason and believed that their interpretation of the Bible was completely logical. The New England Puritans highly regarded the work of Petrus Ramus (1515 - 1572), who authored extensive works of logic. Johann Alsted (1588 - 1638) had created an encyclopedia that claimed to cover all of human knowledge neatly categorized. Though the Bible was still the ultimate authority, the excitement and pleasure of using reason was everywhere.
Religious sects proliferated in Europe. In New England, Anne Hutchinson had the idea that there was no need for all the intellectualizing, that each could have a personal faith in God that would bring undoubted salvation. She was banished from Massachusetts and ultimately killed by the Indians, assumed by those who had banished her to be a judgement from God.
What became the very core of Puritanism in New England was known as the Covenant of Grace. To these New World Puritans, there needed to be some assurance of salvation, some relief from anxiety, an inkling that one was one of the elect, while conceding that at the same time God remained all powerful and knew everything in advance. God had to act in a way that would reassure people, so scripture was read (remember the importance of reason/logic) to support a most curious conception that another Puritan group in England (the Presbyterians) claimed had no basis in scripture at all.
God was made to work as follows. Of His own will, He decided to make a deal with humanity. He would bind himself, as only He could do, to a contract just like a business contract between two parties that would assure people that if they would devote themselves to faith in Him, He would come through for them in the end. But how could this jibe with predestination? Well, He still was all powerful except that now he had voluntarily bound himself. Yes, he could still decide as he wished, but he would not do that because it would be unreasonable and would deceived his creation, something he would never do.
As can be seen from this and as has always been true, far from being subject to an all powerful God, men design the God they wish to have which satisfies the societal needs of the times, that keeps order among the people and maintains authority over individuals through a cohesive idea.
All of what I have written is a mere taste of The New England Mind. As you might expect, the elect, those who just knew they were chosen and were educated in theology, were in charge. The other 4/5th's of the population were not so educated but were expected to attend church and to obey the rules of the community as decided by the divines. Of course it was the divines that decided whether an individual could be admitted to the community and who should be expelled.
One might become saved by grace and for the New England Puritans this was most likely to happen with sudden realization during a profound sermon being delivered on Sunday. It could also happen by an experience in nature; the Holy Spirit entering one while one is gazing at a beautiful sunset for example. Miracles no longer happened in the contrary-to-reason way they did at the time of Jesus. Once scripture came out, no more of that raising of the dead or walking on water stuff. God no longer will defy nature, but he may arrange something natural to happen, such as with Anne Hutchinson as mentioned above.
Perry Smith states that the Puritan experience is a excellent example of the transition from what has been called the Age of Faith to the Age of Reason. The metaphysics of the Puritans was opening the way to reason taking over and faith retiring from the stage it had commanded for almost the entire history of civilization. It is the clarity of Smith's description of this change taking place that makes this book a masterpiece.
To gain from this book, to be able to stay with it, you'll need to want to know about the fascinating and turbulent period that it describes in wonderful detail for a most important part of colonial America. It is an examination of rationalization like no other through intellectual charged religious practice. While it is true that one can never know a time like those who lived it, this epic work comes as close to doing so as I have encountered.
The Puritans were part of the Congregational branch of English Protestantism, closely associated with Calvinism, who fled the turbulent political climate of England that would result in the English civil war between royalists and parliamentarians (1642-1651). All of Europe was in an uproar as Catholics and Protestants fought to the death in the 30 years war (1614-1648) over who were the more authentic followers of of a man who preached non-violence.
Death could easily come not only from following either of the two major divisions of Christianity, but from following some sect of Protestantism unacceptable to authority. How to keep the public under control and the how authority could be legitimate were under intense debate everywhere as all yearned to bring order out of chaos. The history that informed the political thinking of the founders of the United States was in progress.
As one would expect, where authority was discussed the subject could not avoid spilling into the relationship of man to God, considered the ultimate authority. Martin Luther introducing Protestantism a century earlier had thrown open religious thought by stating that the Bible should be open to all without the Church as intermediary between the individual and the words of his creator.
But what to make of a many authored book claimed to be the word of God? As any lawyer can tell you, words can mean just about anything you want them to mean. It was well known that the ancient Greek sophists made a living training the young to take any side of an argument. It was one thing for a pope to declare doctrine for the Church, quite another to set readers of the Bible free.
Luther, taking great care to instruct new Bible readers, insisted that salvation would come through faith alone, not by good works. With Calvin came the idea of predestination, that the salvation of a soul was entirely up to God and was settled in advance. You were to be saved or not as God decided and there was nothing you could do nor know about it. Not surprisingly for this harsh reading that was hard to reconcile both with free will and with justice, there was reaction.
The Puritans were, in keeping with the times following the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient Greek ideas, very fond of reason and believed that their interpretation of the Bible was completely logical. The New England Puritans highly regarded the work of Petrus Ramus (1515 - 1572), who authored extensive works of logic. Johann Alsted (1588 - 1638) had created an encyclopedia that claimed to cover all of human knowledge neatly categorized. Though the Bible was still the ultimate authority, the excitement and pleasure of using reason was everywhere.
Religious sects proliferated in Europe. In New England, Anne Hutchinson had the idea that there was no need for all the intellectualizing, that each could have a personal faith in God that would bring undoubted salvation. She was banished from Massachusetts and ultimately killed by the Indians, assumed by those who had banished her to be a judgement from God.
What became the very core of Puritanism in New England was known as the Covenant of Grace. To these New World Puritans, there needed to be some assurance of salvation, some relief from anxiety, an inkling that one was one of the elect, while conceding that at the same time God remained all powerful and knew everything in advance. God had to act in a way that would reassure people, so scripture was read (remember the importance of reason/logic) to support a most curious conception that another Puritan group in England (the Presbyterians) claimed had no basis in scripture at all.
God was made to work as follows. Of His own will, He decided to make a deal with humanity. He would bind himself, as only He could do, to a contract just like a business contract between two parties that would assure people that if they would devote themselves to faith in Him, He would come through for them in the end. But how could this jibe with predestination? Well, He still was all powerful except that now he had voluntarily bound himself. Yes, he could still decide as he wished, but he would not do that because it would be unreasonable and would deceived his creation, something he would never do.
As can be seen from this and as has always been true, far from being subject to an all powerful God, men design the God they wish to have which satisfies the societal needs of the times, that keeps order among the people and maintains authority over individuals through a cohesive idea.
All of what I have written is a mere taste of The New England Mind. As you might expect, the elect, those who just knew they were chosen and were educated in theology, were in charge. The other 4/5th's of the population were not so educated but were expected to attend church and to obey the rules of the community as decided by the divines. Of course it was the divines that decided whether an individual could be admitted to the community and who should be expelled.
One might become saved by grace and for the New England Puritans this was most likely to happen with sudden realization during a profound sermon being delivered on Sunday. It could also happen by an experience in nature; the Holy Spirit entering one while one is gazing at a beautiful sunset for example. Miracles no longer happened in the contrary-to-reason way they did at the time of Jesus. Once scripture came out, no more of that raising of the dead or walking on water stuff. God no longer will defy nature, but he may arrange something natural to happen, such as with Anne Hutchinson as mentioned above.
Perry Smith states that the Puritan experience is a excellent example of the transition from what has been called the Age of Faith to the Age of Reason. The metaphysics of the Puritans was opening the way to reason taking over and faith retiring from the stage it had commanded for almost the entire history of civilization. It is the clarity of Smith's description of this change taking place that makes this book a masterpiece.
To gain from this book, to be able to stay with it, you'll need to want to know about the fascinating and turbulent period that it describes in wonderful detail for a most important part of colonial America. It is an examination of rationalization like no other through intellectual charged religious practice. While it is true that one can never know a time like those who lived it, this epic work comes as close to doing so as I have encountered.
January 2, 2011
It is the formative modern work on American Puritanism, and every book on Puritanism in America since has had to drink from its well of scholarship. Miller's prose is laborious at times, and his lack of footnoting is really unfortunate, despite the fact that an additional book was published which gave appropriate references for his numerous quotations of primary sources. All in all the work is a positive treatment of Puritanism, the first of its kind in the modern era, which is why it has become the standard. Some Puritans get slammed a bit (Cotton Mather), and some of Miller's general claims have now been shown to be overstatements (i.e. the Puritan's extreme rationalism, or a trend of later generations away from evangelical preaching). Don't read this book unless you love Puritan studies. If you aren't interested in Puritan studies, then please read the Puritans instead--for they are immanently more interesting in their own words, unencumbered.
July 2, 2021
Valuable Foundational Thought, Influences and Inspiration - My interest in the “New England Mind” books arose as they were the inspiration for Walter J. Ong’s work on Peter Ramus (see my review of Ong’s book entitled “Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason” first published in 1958).
This volume was first issued in 1939 and there was another in 1954 that was a follow-up, “The New England Mind: From Colony to Province.” The order of the books is not apparent unless one looks at the publication dates. Both volumes are well written and provide an in-depth account about the foundational thought of pioneering Puritans in North America and its impact; helpful references for those seeking more information on related topics.
The book consists of 4 major sections or “Books” with different essay chapters. In Book I. Religion and Learning, there is a discussion of the nature of Puritan beliefs and their origins. Book II. Cosmology covers colonist use of reason and interpretation of their world. Book III. Anthropology outlines the colonist view of man and human life. Book IV. Sociology goes into the effect of views on character of church, state, and their relationship. Finally, Appendices A and B provide supplementary material.
Due to particular interest, my favorite parts are mainly in Book II in the Chapter “The Instrument of Reason.” That chapter goes more into the influence of Pierre de la Ramee’s (Ramus’s) dialectic or logical method on Puritan and early New Englander thinking. There are links to theses in 1640 and 1670 at what became Harvard University. Appendix A, entitled “The Literature of Ramus’ Logic in Europe” that states “There is a crying need for a full study of Ramus and his influence.” Obviously, it was Ong who completed that full study of Ramus whose need Miller had identified and Ong’s mentor at St. Louis University Marshall McLuhan encouraged.
Books like “The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America” by Louis Menand help show how “The New England Mind” continued to spread from Harvard and become so dominant in American life (see my review of that book for more detail).
We are indebted to Perry Miller for a clear and compelling work in its own right as well as serving as a valuable inspiration and source about the influence of the Ramus method.
This volume was first issued in 1939 and there was another in 1954 that was a follow-up, “The New England Mind: From Colony to Province.” The order of the books is not apparent unless one looks at the publication dates. Both volumes are well written and provide an in-depth account about the foundational thought of pioneering Puritans in North America and its impact; helpful references for those seeking more information on related topics.
The book consists of 4 major sections or “Books” with different essay chapters. In Book I. Religion and Learning, there is a discussion of the nature of Puritan beliefs and their origins. Book II. Cosmology covers colonist use of reason and interpretation of their world. Book III. Anthropology outlines the colonist view of man and human life. Book IV. Sociology goes into the effect of views on character of church, state, and their relationship. Finally, Appendices A and B provide supplementary material.
Due to particular interest, my favorite parts are mainly in Book II in the Chapter “The Instrument of Reason.” That chapter goes more into the influence of Pierre de la Ramee’s (Ramus’s) dialectic or logical method on Puritan and early New Englander thinking. There are links to theses in 1640 and 1670 at what became Harvard University. Appendix A, entitled “The Literature of Ramus’ Logic in Europe” that states “There is a crying need for a full study of Ramus and his influence.” Obviously, it was Ong who completed that full study of Ramus whose need Miller had identified and Ong’s mentor at St. Louis University Marshall McLuhan encouraged.
Books like “The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America” by Louis Menand help show how “The New England Mind” continued to spread from Harvard and become so dominant in American life (see my review of that book for more detail).
We are indebted to Perry Miller for a clear and compelling work in its own right as well as serving as a valuable inspiration and source about the influence of the Ramus method.
January 14, 2018
The biographical summary of Miller is interesting. A man who got his PhD in an era where 1 year of undergrad work, followed by three years of grad work after a hiatus traveling the world, could quite directly land tenure at Harvard. One thinks of Miller as a tweedy Harvard professor in the "consensus" era of historiography. Trapped inside the minutia of high culture debates, he seems one caught in the amber of historiographical time. Perhaps, as Stephen Foster implied in "New England and the Challenge of Heresy" (WMQ 1981), "division" and "dissention" did have an intimate association with "decline." What did Miller accomplish? He rescued the Puritans from the hands of the Progressive Historians, who had relegated them to the positions of demagogues and hypocrites. In the words of Bernard Bailyn, he "recast the image of New England origins from one of hypocrisy, savage intolerance and the stultification of the senses, to one of intellectual and spiritual splendor." (Bailyn's review of Errand into the Wilderness in Essex Institute).
It is indeed a different world in the sense of academic sociology, but also in terms of the types of things that interest scholars. As Hall points out in his "On Common Ground," the interest in social history of the 1960s and 70s certainly refocused the profession away from the close textual exegesis of Perry Miller's New England Mind. As social history came into fashion, so intellectual history went out. Even with the literary turn of the 80s and 90s, when we returned to the study of the Mathers' writings, it is more to understand their relationship with the popular press than it is to probe the depths of Calvinist - Puritan intellectual continuities. Within New England Studies, the impact of Gender (masculinity as well as femininity) have impacted our view of the clergy and interactions with the laity as they changed over time. See C Dayton (Taking the Trade). Today we celebrate difference, division and dissention. We sing with Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass ... "Do I contradict myself? So I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes" And we seek out the sources of social and cultural contest. We glory in our differences and in the genius of America in containing all of this ...
It is indeed a different world in the sense of academic sociology, but also in terms of the types of things that interest scholars. As Hall points out in his "On Common Ground," the interest in social history of the 1960s and 70s certainly refocused the profession away from the close textual exegesis of Perry Miller's New England Mind. As social history came into fashion, so intellectual history went out. Even with the literary turn of the 80s and 90s, when we returned to the study of the Mathers' writings, it is more to understand their relationship with the popular press than it is to probe the depths of Calvinist - Puritan intellectual continuities. Within New England Studies, the impact of Gender (masculinity as well as femininity) have impacted our view of the clergy and interactions with the laity as they changed over time. See C Dayton (Taking the Trade). Today we celebrate difference, division and dissention. We sing with Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass ... "Do I contradict myself? So I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes" And we seek out the sources of social and cultural contest. We glory in our differences and in the genius of America in containing all of this ...
April 26, 2025
Perry’s work is a seminal study of intellectual history and a model for later works in a similar vein. It is a work of sociology on the collective mind of a culture, taking as its main sources the copious theological writings of the New England Puritans. Taking stock of the Puritan mind from these productions requires a great deal of skill and depth of knowledge. A shallow reading of Puritan ideas and history has produced a caricature in the contemporary mind. So few of us see anything but witch trials and ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God’, and the Puritan world is wrapped up in a little ball and punted around the American politico-cultural pitch. It can be abused as the noxious well-spring of various currents in American life, depending on one’s outlook. Some blame it for the peculiar American religiosity and phantasmic threat of theocracy. The stern, sober morality of these mercantile New Englanders might figure as the American manifestation of Weber’s Protestant work ethic or the bourgeois culture of capitalism. The new American right has gotten in on the action too and lobs the accusation of proto-wokeness at the sour-faced, bonneted scolds of old Boston and the magisterial busybodies of Cambridge.
If you are looking for any one such scintillating ‘take’ on the Puritans, look the other way. Perry handles his material with subtlety and incredible depth. He pares down the exaggerated misconceptions while giving a faithful account of their basis in the facts. Perry gets the Puritans as they were with top-notch academic thoroughness, though I suspect any reader but the most dedicated of specialists would find some of the details tedious at times. I hope never to see the name Petrus Ramus again. The book starts strong with a tracing of the intellectual heritage of the Puritans. It drags a bit through the middle portion on rhetoric, though the explanation of the “plain style” of the Puritans is important. The final part on the concept of the covenant and its function in church and society closes the work on a high note as Perry arrives at the real essence of the New England Puritan culture. For anyone who to place this undoubtedly influential people in their proper place in history, Perry’s work is the one.
If you are looking for any one such scintillating ‘take’ on the Puritans, look the other way. Perry handles his material with subtlety and incredible depth. He pares down the exaggerated misconceptions while giving a faithful account of their basis in the facts. Perry gets the Puritans as they were with top-notch academic thoroughness, though I suspect any reader but the most dedicated of specialists would find some of the details tedious at times. I hope never to see the name Petrus Ramus again. The book starts strong with a tracing of the intellectual heritage of the Puritans. It drags a bit through the middle portion on rhetoric, though the explanation of the “plain style” of the Puritans is important. The final part on the concept of the covenant and its function in church and society closes the work on a high note as Perry arrives at the real essence of the New England Puritan culture. For anyone who to place this undoubtedly influential people in their proper place in history, Perry’s work is the one.
January 20, 2025
Does Anyone read Perry Miller anymore? OSS agent, scholar, and alcoholic, Harvard professor, major contributor to the development of the fields of American intellectual history and American Studies, Miller has been denounced as an imperialist by some left-leaning scholars, though I have to say, how retrograde can you be if Margaret Atwood dedicated The Handmaid's Tale to you? (It's true: look at your copy!).
I have to admit I love reading Miller. I took The New England Mind off the shelves last night and re-read a few chapters. I love the beautiful prose. I find the reverence for "justice, temperence and industry" to be inspiring. I appreciate the value he places on the life of the mind, his defense of "the importance of ideas in American history." And I have to admit it, I admire our Puritan forebears, despite the flaws. It is easy to denounce them, and the scholars who study them, for racism and patriarchy; but in fairness, I think one should also respect the Puritans for their idealism, their commitment to simplicity and piety, their belief that education and self-criticism can lead to self-perfection.
Methodologically, I find the book difficult. I find it hard to accept the idea that a single more or less homogenous entity called the "New England Mind" existed without major changes for a century. Life just does not work like that. Minds are deeply heterogenous and ideas develop rapidly over time, even in centuries with a reputation for stability. But that is a small price to pay for such lovely scholarship. I do not read Miller because his story is true. I read it because it is thought-provoking and inspiring, and out of respect for his command of the field.
Can we still imagine a world in which the New England Puritans of the 17th century are viewed as central to our national development?
I have to admit I love reading Miller. I took The New England Mind off the shelves last night and re-read a few chapters. I love the beautiful prose. I find the reverence for "justice, temperence and industry" to be inspiring. I appreciate the value he places on the life of the mind, his defense of "the importance of ideas in American history." And I have to admit it, I admire our Puritan forebears, despite the flaws. It is easy to denounce them, and the scholars who study them, for racism and patriarchy; but in fairness, I think one should also respect the Puritans for their idealism, their commitment to simplicity and piety, their belief that education and self-criticism can lead to self-perfection.
Methodologically, I find the book difficult. I find it hard to accept the idea that a single more or less homogenous entity called the "New England Mind" existed without major changes for a century. Life just does not work like that. Minds are deeply heterogenous and ideas develop rapidly over time, even in centuries with a reputation for stability. But that is a small price to pay for such lovely scholarship. I do not read Miller because his story is true. I read it because it is thought-provoking and inspiring, and out of respect for his command of the field.
Can we still imagine a world in which the New England Puritans of the 17th century are viewed as central to our national development?
April 4, 2023
Well, it is worth wading through the abstruse recounting of the finer points of Ramus' dialectic to reach the final part, in which Miller lays out with great skill and eloquence the theology and the church structure of New England Congregationalism. A great deal of American history cannot be understood without first understanding the overwhelming notion of a "Covenant of Grace" that drove 17th-century disssenters. The brash idealism and hamartia of subsequent American political history, both at home and abroad, cannot be fully explained except by the Puritan identification with the people of Israel, nd the contagious notion that we have, to quote the inimitable Kate Bush, "made a deal with God." All American exceptionalism, whether justified by the novelty of its pieties and institutions or grossly prideful to the nth degree, ultimately stems from this powerful notion, that the weight of history is in some degree on our shoulders. That we are indeed a City on a Hill.
In all our denouncements of the ghastly thing that our politics have become, in the penitent cries of 'Blasphemy!' that Trumpism continues to inspire, it is apparent that we still retain this sense of our own importance, that what we do in this nation matters irrevocably, and that history will judge us harshly whatever we do.
We still retain some belief in this covenant of grace, centuries on, though it has, freed of its theological underpinnings, been reduced to an animal instinct, something primal at the level of evolutionary memory, ready to indict us at the smallest breach of our innocence.
In all our denouncements of the ghastly thing that our politics have become, in the penitent cries of 'Blasphemy!' that Trumpism continues to inspire, it is apparent that we still retain this sense of our own importance, that what we do in this nation matters irrevocably, and that history will judge us harshly whatever we do.
We still retain some belief in this covenant of grace, centuries on, though it has, freed of its theological underpinnings, been reduced to an animal instinct, something primal at the level of evolutionary memory, ready to indict us at the smallest breach of our innocence.
May 5, 2021
tonight on channel 13 news we're talking about a hot new type of minimalism they're saying is a whole lot more than just smooth surfaces. it's been taking over the crown's northern colonies in the new world forming small but substantial outposts like Boston and Salem. Puritanism, a club born in a world after the wars by Luther and Calvin but not yet fully cleansed of the clutter of scholasticism and gothic architecture. These flinty, unadorned brothers and sisters have said it's time to roll up those sleeves and take occam's razor off the shelf because the intellectual tradition of christendom, needs a shave
January 17, 2018
Admittedly, I did not read this whole work. But Miller's work--while certainly a product of its time-- is comprehensive and generally represents the Puritans in their own words and through their own worldview. Unfortunately, though Miller is exhaustive in his explication of Puritan understandings of piety, intellectualism, science, and various covenants, there is no discussion in this book on what Puritans thought of their physical struggles in the land they occupied as colonizers, nor of the people they met there.
November 16, 2022
A brilliant historian, Miller shatters popular impressions of Puritan life and thought in America.
June 15, 2020
I saw this on somebody's shelf, and instantly unhappily remembered that I had to read it in grad school. I was only a mere child in my early twenties, my brain was not ready for this book...
March 5, 2015
This book from 1939 is very much a product of its time. Miller focuses only on men and elite writings in telling his story of New England Puritanism. I think it's a good idea to situate religion within a broader intellectual history framework, and Miller should be applauded for reading tons of seventeenth-century British theology and logic philosophy. Miller also shows that the Puritans weren't just dour stereotypes, but rather complex people who found joy in their religion. Unfortunately, Miller chooses to treat all of Puritan thought as the product of "a single intelligence" – in other words, he sees Puritan culture as so uniform that he skips over individual personalities and treats Puritanism as a closed system. I'd say that's pretty ahistorical for a historian! The book really works better as theology, especially once Miller enthuses about invisible forces which the Puritans recognized in their lives. Those invisible forces can't be proven to be there, so I don't think they belong in a history book. Theology, sure, but not history. Still, Perry Miller's book shows us how a historian of religion wrote in the modernist, post-Progressive period – focused solely on Christianity, men, stasis, and numinous forces.
Read
January 10, 2014This book is awesome...too often people look at the Puritans as some repressive, somber group of men who wielded control over New England wearing clothes of black and brown, immortalized in a million grade-school plays. The reality is that 1., the Puritans worked very hard to reconcile their rigorous faith with their flock, and with the people who hovered at the edge of their flock. And 2., The idea of a covenant, so vital to Puritan philosophy, permeates throughout all of American law & politics...the idea that honest deals can be brokered by two sides, that actions have consequences, and thus sticking to - or not fulfilling - the details of a covenant can have upsides and downsides...great book!
May 18, 2016
Some really interesting nuggets here, buried in page upon page of lackluster minutiae. As a non-historian, I'll leave method quibbles and questions of datedness aside, and say that I'd have much preferred something operating at a bit higher level of synthesis and taking in more than just theological and liturgical writings of Mass. Bay's ruling class. Miller brings us up to the edge of some pretty fascinating territory regarding the inner life of Puritans, the seeming contradictions their thought bridged between religious ecstasy and logical punctiliousness. Still, it all seems very stuck on paper, in terms both of its sources and the lack of lightness, or illumination, in its prose.
November 28, 2011
Ugh, that's done. A major Mego and cure for insomnia book.
August 8, 2014
I particularly liked the sections on anti-Aristotelian thought and then the impact of Ramus on New England thought.
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