My dissertation reappraises the Puritan conversion narrative's influence on early and later American literature. It centers around the accounts recorded by the Reverend Thomas Shepard, minister to Cambridge's first church, and looks at how New England's earliest settlers represented their spiritual encounters. My study argues for Puritanism's continued cultural relevance by explaining how the inter-personal, social, and expressive energies that informed Puritan spiritual confession is both sustained and evolves in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Chapter I accounts for the social, historical, and intellectual contexts in which the Puritan conversion narrative took place and outlines the scholarship it has received. Amid this scholarship I offer my analysis in Chapter II, pointing to the performance's formal, doctrinal, and expressive requirements to explain how believers delivered successful narratives and how they pushed the bounds of the religious doctrine that informed their accounts. Chapter III re-imagines the experience of Puritan conversion. It considers the performance from an affective framework and argues that the ambivalence endemic to spiritual assurance provoked in believers a psychogenic and narratological discord that promoted a form of self-understanding in which believers were unsure of themselves even as their spiritual communities were certain that their conversions were complete. Chapter III concludes by assessing the literary consequences of this relationship with reference to Benjamin Franklin's

From Chapter 1: It was shortly after receiving his Master of Arts degree at Cambridge that Goodwin was converted, by his own report, recorded by his son Goodwin's conversion gives us remarkable insight into the spiritual condition of the early seventeenth century and William HaIler cites it as "worthy in its way to be compared to the most notable self-revelations of the Puritan soul "[1] Born on the 5th of October, 1600 in the Norfolk village of Rolesby and reared in Yarmouth, the eldest son of Richard and Catherine Goodwin came to Christ's College, Cambridge in 1613, at twelve years old, where he learned the Heidelberg Catechism and Ursinus' Commentary It was also a time when the Dutch church was in convulsions over the Arminian controversy With the memory of Perkins, deceased ten years, lingering in everyone's minds, Richard Sibbes - Perkins's successor - was preaching at Trinity Church, and his famous sermons attracted those who were dissatisfied with the embellished rhetoric of others Most notable among them was Dr Senhouse, an Arminian orator [2] At fourteen, Goodwin eagerly anticipated Easter, when he would receive his first Communion and he prepared earnestly for it by attending Sibbes' lectures and reading Calvin's Institutes ("and 0 how sweet was the reading of some Parts of that Book to me1") [3] In addition, he had many fine examples of godly and learned tutors As Whitsunday approached, Goodwin felt, "I should be so confirm'd that I should never fall away," but much to his surprise and embarrassment, he was too young Alas, when the day arrived, his tutor kindly kept him from receiving the Supper [4].

John Eliot (1604-1690) has been called ‘the apostle to the Indians’. This thesis looks at Eliot not from the perspective of modern Protestant ‘mission’ studies (the approach mainly adopted by previous research) but in the historical and theological context of 17th century puritanism. Drawing on recent research on migration to New England, the thesis argues that Eliot, like many other migrants, went to New England primarily in search of a safe haven to practise pure reformed Christianity, not to convert Indians. Eliot’s Indian ministry started from a fundamental concern for the conversion of the unconverted, which he derived from his experience of the puritan movement in England. Consequently, for Eliot, the notion of New England Indian ‘mission’ was essentially conversion-oriented, Wordcentred, and pastorally focussed, and (in common with the broader aims of New England churches) pursued a pure reformed Christianity. Eliot hoped to achieve this through the establishment of Praying Towns organised on a biblical model – where preaching, pastoral care and the practice of piety could lead to conversion – leading to the formation of Indian churches composed of ‘sincere converts’. The thesis starts with a critical historiographical reflection on how missiologists deploy the term ‘mission’, and proposes a perspectival shift for a better understanding of Eliot (Chapter 1). The groundwork for this new perspective is laid by looking at key themes in recent scholarship on puritanism, focusing on motives for the Great Migration, millenarian beliefs, and the desire for Indian conversion (Chapter 2). This chapter concludes that Indian conversion and millenarianism were not the main motives for Eliot’s migration to the New World, nor were his thoughts on the millennium an initial or lasting motive for Indian ministry. Next, the thesis investigates Eliot’s historical and theological context as a minister, through the ideas of puritan contemporaries in Old and New England, and presents a new perspective on Eliot by suggesting that conversion theology and pastoral theology were the most fundamental and lasting motives for his Indian ministry (Chapter 3). After the first three chapters, which relocate Eliot in his historical context, the last three chapters consider Eliot’s pastoral activities with the Indians. These have usually been understood as ‘mission’, without sufficient understanding of Eliot’s historical and theological context in the puritan movement and how he applied its ideas to Indian ministry. The thesis examines Eliot’s views on ‘Praying Towns’ as settlements for promoting civility and religion, and ‘Indian churches’ as congregations of true believers formed by covenant (Chapter 4). It investigates Eliot’s activities in the Indian communities, to apply puritan theology and ministerial practice to the Indians as his new parishioners (Chapter 5). Finally, the thesis offers a comparison of puritan and Indian conversion narratives, to try to recover Praying Indians’ own voices about conversion and faith (Chapter 6). This analysis finds both similarities and differences. The extent of the similarities does not necessarily mean (as some have alleged) that puritanism was unilaterally imposed on the Indians. The evidence equally well suggests a nuanced picture of Eliot’s engagement with the Indians from the perspective of 17th century puritanism and its conversion-oriented parish ministry.

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Over four chapters, this study extends and focuses recent critical work on religious sects in literature to examine five plays and one theatrical prose work from the late medieval period through the late seventeenth century in England. Specifically, this study charts the appearance and conduct of antinomians, or those whose faith in Christ is the sole guide for their actions and who eschew all outward behavioral constraints. Antinomianism is, in some ways, a logical step for newly empowered individual believers with no direct mediator between themselves and the Word, but it represents a dangerous potential for religious and social anarchy. For some of the characters I consider, antinomianism has been mapped onto them by modern literary critics precisely because their transgressive agency is so frightening to their contemporaries. For others, antinomianism is depicted as a positive mode of interacting with the unenlightened, but it is clear that these figures are allowed privilege outside the reach of mainstream believers. A negative parody of these normal believers is also represented in my project, and these characters' buffoonish misinterpretations and selfish motives negate any positive reading of their "liberating" antinomian belief. All of these characters--whether positive, negative, or even truly antinomian at all--reveal a key anxiety about personal belief and the well-being of civic and religious society in the mercurial landscape of pre- and post-Reformation England and the atmosphere of social and religious uncertainty that preceded the English Civil War. As such, an attention to the interconnections between the works under primary study and those circulating in the culture at the time is crucial to accurately identifying and understanding the myriad shades of religious belief that populate the pages of literature and polemics alike. In part, my project works to create a more complete and nuanced picture of the religious and literary landscapes of early modern England.

My dissertation, Unspeakable Joy: Rejoicing in Early Modern England, claims that the act of rejoicing--expressing religious joy--was a crucial rhetorical element of literary works in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England. The expression of religious joy in literature functioned as a sign of belief and sanctification in English Protestant theology, and became the emotive articulation of a hopeful union between earthly passion and an anticipated heavenly feeling. By taking into account the historical-theological definitions of joy in the reformed tradition, I offer new readings of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century texts, including the Sidney Psalms, Donne's sermons, Spenser's Epithalamion, Richard Rogers's spiritual diaries, and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. I suggest that much of early modern poetics stems from a desire, on behalf of writers, to articulate the ineffable joy so often described by sermons and tracts. By establishing Renaissance emotional expression as a source of religious epistemology and negotiating the cognitive and constructive understandings of emotion, I show that religious rejoicing in Elizabethan Protestantism consists of a series of emotive speech acts designed to imitate the hoped-for joys of heaven. Finally, these readings emphasize the ways in which rejoicing not only functions as a reaffirmation of belief in and commitment to the state church but also becomes the primary agent for spiritual affect by bestowing grace on an individual believer.

The 17th century was quite nakedly a period of nation-building, cultural dislocation, and renegotiation of status within the Massachusetts Bay Colony. As a binding legal document formulated on Puritan religious principles The Body of Liberties mapped out the relationship of the church to the commonwealth, the Commonwealth to the male head of household, and the head of the household to the wife, children, and servants. By formalizing what had previously been a matter of custom and tradition, this early document solidified the social hierarchy and brought it under the purview of law. It was within this context that the first legal prohibition against domestic violence was formulated in the West, dictating that “Every marryed woeman shall be free from bodilie correction or stripes by her husband, unless it be in his own defence upon her assault” (excerpt from the Body of Liberties cited in Pleck 1987:21-22). Given that this migrant culture lay at the precipice of change (geographically displaced and in the process of displacing), and because they were equipped with the technical means to ‘fix’ these relations through law backed by force and sanction, it is reasonable to ask: ‘Why this law?’ ‘Why now?’ and ‘Toward what effects?’ I begin by arguing against Pleck’s (1987,1989) claim that the Massachusetts Bay Colony devised a law against domestic violence out of humanitarian concern for women. By describing the socio-political context in which this law was one small aspect of a much broader and somewhat fragmented endeavor to assert ‘order’ and to establish authority, I argue that it would be a mistake to emphasize its prohibitive message over and above its productive and often contradictory effects. Drawing from Haskins insights on 17th century English legal tactics, and Roberts-Millers (1999) analysis of Puritan logic and language use, I warn against reading Puritan rhetoric or legal discourse literally, or ignoring the ways in which a complex system of regulatory controls and discursive slippages interacts to produce unexpected effects. When this new law prohibiting domestic violence is placed within this context, new insights and new questions emerge. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2008-06-30 15:23:07.094

This thesis consists of annotations and an introduction which constitute an edition of Richard Bernard’s Ruths Recompence (1628). This edition aims to provide a more modern and accurate (though clarified) text than the nineteenth-century edition edited by Alexander Balloch Grosart (1865). It also sets out to offer a more comprehensive interpretation with an emphasis on a subject prominent in Bernard’s commentary passed over in silence by Grosart, that is, the issues relating to women’s conduct raised by Ruth’s approach to Boaz alone by night in Ruth chapter 3. The text of this edition has been produced by applying Optical Character Recognition to a copy of the 1628 edition in my possession. In presenting the text, an editorial policy has been consistently followed, which is described in the Textual Introduction. The main objective is to reproduce the original as closely as possible at the same time as making the work accessible to the modern reader. In the early modern period much was written about women’s conduct and how they ought to behave. Ruths Recompence provides a specifically puritan perspective on this issue. In the introduction, various kinds of literature about women in the early modern period, such as conduct books and lives of women, are surveyed in order to show the context in which Bernard addressed the conduct of Ruth and Naomi. The editorial framework also analyses Bernard’s developing and to some extent censorious evaluation of the women’s behaviour. Another subject relating to women’s conduct addressed, chiefly in the introduction, is breast-feeding. Bernard’s views are related to those expressed by the preceding commentator on Ruth, Edward Topsell, and by a contemporary woman – the Countess of Lincoln. The editorial framework draws on the work of commentators on Ruth preceding Bernard, in the ancient and medieval as well as the early modern periods. This reference to previous commentators is a significant part of the edition because it shows where Bernard’s views are original. In the introduction biographical information about Bernard himself, in particular, and also the earlier commentators is provided. A tradition of commentaries on Ruth is thus depicted. It is argued that Bernard’s significant contribution to this tradition is his application of his own theory of preaching, set out in his The Faithfull Shepheard (first edition 1607), to Ruths Recompence. The present edition interprets various other aspects of the commentary, in particular, those relating to Bernard’s theological position as a puritan clergyman who was involved with separatism early in his career but later published attacks on separatists and conformed uneasily with the Church of England. In the commentary, he criticises Roman Catholicism, and expresses views on providence, predestination and the Anabaptists. These subjects are commented on in the editorial framework. Other subjects to which this edition draws the reader’s attention include Bernard’s repeated reference to hierarchy in society and his admiration of the simple, primitive legal system depicted in Ruth. The introduction concludes with a glance at modern feminist scholars’ writing on Ruth. The present edition aspires to make a contribution to feminist interpretations of the early modern period, and it can be recognised that many of the feminist features perceived in the biblical narrative by modern scholars are far from the concerns of Bernard, who was in most respects a typically patriarchal clergyman of his time.

Reprint of the author's thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1931. / Bibliography: p. 146-151.

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