Puritanism and Its Discontents

"This volume works to restore both a radical edge and a new specificity to the much-debated definitions of Puritans and Puritanism. Ranging from the 1622 election of a new master at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to Oliver Cromwell's self-fashioning, to uses of the Turk in anti-Puritan polemic, to Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian crisis, the ten essays offer a detailed account of the intersection of religion, politics, and culture in England and America in the seventeenth century and beyond. Each essay shows how a dynamic and shifting Puritanism is constructed in and through conflict, and how a radical impulse to discontent is part of Puritan self-identity.

Such work also counters the long-standing and still popular notion of Puritanism as, like Freud's civilization, a repressive and monolithic entity, obsessed with guilt and generating neuroses. Rather, the essays show that discontents are not simply a response to Puritans but an integral part of the definition of Puritanism itself."

"Focusing on new topics in cultural history - discursive constructions, institutions, and community - contributors to this volume explore how discontents shape a complex Puritanism in England and America. The collection expands the boundaries of the study of Puritanism to include lay experience, women, popular print, and questions of class structure, ethnicity, and gender. By tracing core discontents, the essays restore the anxiety-ridden radical nature of Puritanism, helping to account for its force in the seventeenth century and the popular and scholarly interest that it continues to evoke.

Innovative and challenging in scope and argument, the volume should be of interest to scholars of early modern British and American history, literature, culture, and religion."--Jacket.