The purpose of this study is to find the virtue ethics John Bunyan presents in Pilgrim´s Progress part 1, compared with the virtues Max Weber presents, and then try Weber´s theory on the empirical data, Pilgrim´s Progress. When I compare the virtues in Weber´s theory with the virtues in Pilgrim´s Progress, I interpret Weber´s theory as limited. From Weber´s theory emerges the puritan virtues: fulfillment of duty, struggle, self-control and live simply. He also mentions gratitude to God and helpfulness to other people, but this is shown through work in the society. These virtues can also be found in Pilgrim´s Progress. The fulfillment of duty in Weber´s theory is mainly focused on work-ethic, while I interpret the fulfillment of duty in Pilgrim´s Progress more focused on the struggle with the Belief in God. The virtues self-control and to live simply is clearly seen in both sources, which strengthens this part of Weber´s theory. The most interesting thing is that I found several virtues in Pilgrim´s Progress, which Weber did not attributed any significant. These are: forgiveness, help, spiritual communion, and gratitude to God.

The thesis examines the relationship between reprobation fears and melancholic illness in puritan culture over a period of approximately ninety years. Reprobation formed part of the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, by which God had chosen a few for salvation (the elect), and many for destruction (the reprobate). When a person came to believe that they were reprobate, this could give rise to symptoms of fear and despair similar to those associated with melancholy (an imbalance of black bile believed to affect the brain). The thesis shows how puritans used explanations based on melancholy in order to explain how otherwise godly people came to doubt their election. The first chapter shows how the Calvinist physician, Timothy Bright, incorporated ideas from medieval scholastic and medical texts into his Treatise of melancholie (1586), in order to explain how physiological causes could be at the root of reprobation fears. The second and third chapters examine the religious context in which Bright was writing. The second chapter shows puritan ambivalence about pronouncing a person to be reprobate through an examination of responses to the death of the apostate, Francesco Spiera. The third chapter shows how the Elizabethan puritan clergy developed a form of consolation for those suffering from despair of salvation based on the medieval idea that melancholy was the ‘devil’s bath’. The fourth and fifth chapters show the importance of physiological explanations for despair in defending the reputations of the dying. When a godly person despaired on their death-bed, or committed suicide, this was blamed on a combination of forces external to themselves – melancholy and the devil. The final chapter shows how Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy adapted puritan ideas about despair, to be more acceptable in the context of growing resistance to the preaching of double predestination in the 1620s and 30s.

John Eliot (1604-1690) was known as the “apostle to the Indians” in both Old and New England during his lifetime. His goal of inculcating “civility” with religion among “praying Indians” is often noted as representing an agenda by New English missionaries for cultural assimilation. This dissertation argues that an appropriate understanding of Eliot’s motives and methodology in ministry to Native Americans obtains from a consideration of the Congregationalist and sacrament-centered spirituality he indicated in publications before and after King Philip’s War. Eliot’s mission was more shaped by ecclesiology than eschatology or the aim of cultural hegemony. Eliot intended “praying town” settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to provide Native enquirers the kind of communitarian experience he believed essential for the establishment and maintenance of congregations comprised of genuine converts who could as members in good standing together practice the Lord’s Supper. Communal life with sacramental practice would be the ultimate way for them to experience Christ’s presence. This study extends previous scholarship by employing a theological perspective to explicate Eliot’s understanding of covenantal theology and the work of the Spirit of Christ through various “means of grace.” The project incorporates the perspectives of early American historians; Puritan scholars, especially historians of doctrine; literary critics; and recent studies of colonial encounter that posit cultural negotiation. This dissertation suggests that Eliot’s practices in mission reflect the meaning of Congregationalist Puritanism in colonial context. It adds to the emerging picture of a variegated transatlantic Puritanism and suggests that Eliot’s corpus should be considered in studies of Puritan pneumatology, Christology, sanctification, the sacraments, and religious declension. Eliot’s contribution as a contextual theologian becomes clear when his writings are examined alongside select documents from contemporary interlocutors such as Richard Baxter, Daniel Gookin, William Hubbard, Increase Mather, Mary Rowlandson, and Thomas Shepard. The study also suggests that Eliot’s later literary productions in English reflect his experience in cross-cultural ministry more than is currently recognized, especially his Lord’s Supper preparative, The Harmony of the Gospels, in the Holy History of the Humiliation and Sufferings of Jesus Christ (1678).

Leading into the American Revolution, Puritan captivity narratives gained a resurgent popularity as nationalized sentiment burned towards political upheaval. Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative (1682) was reprinted six times between 1770-1776, signifying an incredible interest in Puritan stories that seemed to antithetically inspire a progressive and radical revolution against England. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God or A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson enhanced an already fervent revolutionary sentiment, transforming a seemingly straightforward captivity narrative into a totem meant to represent the oppressive struggle between England and her most coveted colony. Such a literary revival taps into an early American sentiment that understood and valued captivity for its power both to define American freedom and elicit revolutionary action. By examining the original 1682 text and numerous supplementary and critical articles and works, this thesis unveils how and why Mary Rowlandson inspired a seemingly unrelated insurgency nearly 100 years after her captivity. By aligning Mary Rowlandson’s iconic mythology alongside contemporary depictions of captivity and bondage, eighteenth-century propagandists appropriated her image and story to meet their revolutionary rhetorical requirements.

In this dissertation, I argue that the iconoclastic and anti-materialistic "art of living to God" is the central theoretical preoccupation of English and American Puritan intellectuals. I call attention to a wealth of previously unacknowledged writing about image, art, architecture, and form in Puritan literature, while highlighting how recent materialist analyses of Puritan culture have effectively obscured evidence of iconoclasm and anti-materialism in this milieu. In the first chapter, I explore the Puritan inheritance of John Calvin's theology of the "living image," which defines human beings as God-made pictures and greater than all images that are man-made. I explain how Puritan image theory is wedded to a theorization of the art of living to God, such that Puritan art and image theory are one and the same. The second chapter delineates various ways in which the imitation of Christ undergirds the conceptualization of "art work" in Puritanism. Here I focus on how Puritan ideas about both art and image intersect with their theorizations of happiness, shining, walking, and printing/pressing. I examine the theology of "edification" in my third chapter, probing how godly Puritans were understood to be "living architecture" and "living plants." In Chapter 4 I consider how Puritan anti-formalism contributes to and complicates Puritan art and image theory. More than anything else, a preoccupation with theorizing image, art, architecture, and form is what makes intellectual Puritanism a coherent tradition across space (England and the Netherlands to New England) and time (ca. 1560-1730). In the fifth and concluding chapter, I address an aspect of Puritan ministerial writings in which pastoral practice is defined not as art work but in terms of image curatorship and conservation. I then suggest that Puritan biographical literatures are archives or histories of artful and edificatory performativity. I argue that texts such as broadside elegies, funeral sermons, the monumental collections of lives by Samuel Clarke and Cotton Mather, and perhaps even gravestones should be understood as histories of Puritan art and architecture. / History of Art and Architecture

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Since the publication of Mary Rowlandson's, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God . . ., released six years after the close of King Philip's War and the death of the Pokanoket leader, Metacomet, in 1682, the Indian captivity narrative has operated as a widely influential component of American literary, historical, and cultural discourse. From the seventeenth century to the present, the metaphors, symbols, and the implicit ideologies of this literary genre have had a powerful and enduring influence on the public's perception of American Indian people, and the development of an expansionist American ideology. As a result, the operant binary of the bloodthirsty "savage" and the "civilized" Euro-American has become a common feature of discourses in which American Indian people have been, and continue to be, represented in American historiography, literature, art, film, and popular culture, while also serving as a primary textual justification for the territorial expansion of the United States, and as an implicit justification and historical alibi for the concomitant destruction of American Indian societies and cultures.In this work, my aim is to deconstruct and demystify the regime of literary and historical privilege that has become an explicit function of Rowlandson's text and subsequent narratives by presenting a critical perspective that is responsive to the complex array of social, cultural, and historical forces that were converging in the Massachusetts colony during the late seventeenth century. In so doing, I have attempted to present the "Indian side" of the story and examine the events that Rowlandson describes in her narrative from the perspective of Indian people who have been all too often silenced in American historical and literary discourses. I have addressed and attempted to answer some of the nagging questions surrounding the original publication and dissemination of Rowlandson's work in order to shed some much needed light on the complex cultural and social processes at work in Puritan society during the seventeenth century, while illustrating how texts such as Rowlandson's continues to shape our perceptions of others and our own conceptions of historical reality.

This study of Norfolk and Bedfordshire in the civil war and Interregnum was based on an analysis of the membership of the various committees appointed for the counties between December 1642 and March 1660. The members of the committees were divided into groups for analysis according to the dates of their first and last appointments. The gentry of Norfolk and Bedfordshire, which were both Parliamentarian counties, filled the committees of the 1640s, as they had the commissions of the peace in the 1630s. After the execution of the King in January'' 1649, the membership of the Bedfordshire committees was drastically changed by the loss of almost all the gentry members, while the Norfolk committees remained largely unchanged until I65I-I652. The difference between the counties was traced to the displacement of the secluded MPs- from the committees; the probably voluntary withdrawal of the Bedfordshire gentry; the weaker and more fluid gentry community and the greater penetration of radical political and religious ideas in Bedfordshire. Throughout the 1650s, Bedfordshire was administered by people new to county office, of lower social rank and more radical opinions than their gentry predecessors• Similar new people became important in Norfolk after I65I, but they did not replace the gentry, who retained their role and influence. In late 1659 and early 1660, the gentry in both counties returned to sole control of local government, displacing the new officials of the 1650s. A similar pattern in the type of committeemen was observed in both counties: the committeemen appointed before 1649 and in 1660 were of the same social rank as those holding county office before 1640, but the committeemen appointed for the first time I649-I656 were of markedly lower social origins. It was noted that in Bedfordshire, and to a much lesser extent in Norfolk, these new officials of the 1650s proved a viable alternative administration to the traditional gentry elite. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

This thesis in Church History examines the changing attitudes of Protestants toward Church History. The primary evidence surveyed is statements within major Protestant confessions, as well as the views of selected Reformers. By focusing on how Protestant confessions either quote the church fathers, or affirm the ancient creeds of the Church, the thesis presents a general overview of how Protestants have related to Church History. This thesis takes advantage of many recent studies on the use of church fathers by the reformers, and new critical study of creeds and confessions. A study of selected reformers and Protestant confessions demonstrates that an important part of the Reformation program was the claim to continuity with the early church, as opposed to the perceived innovations of Rome. A brief survey of reformation attitudes towards history also shows that appeals to church history were largely determined by the historical and polemical context of the times. Calvin and Bucer, for instance, make stronger or weaker appeals to church history depending in which polemical context they found themselves. As a result of the hardening of confessional lines, a more critical attitude towards church history developed, especially in Anabaptism and English Puritanism. Whereas the reformers and most Protestant confessions claim continuity with the “ancient church,” the Puritans claimed continuity with the “apostolic” church. This is ironic because the Puritans wanted to reform the English church according to the model of the “best reformed churches,” whose confessions affirm the ancient creeds. Thus, this thesis provides further evidence for the claims of other scholars who have argued that there are two main view of church history within Protestantism: one that stresses continuity with the church in history, and one which stresses interpretation of the Bible free from any historical considerations. As Stephen R. Holmes has suggested, one party sought to “reform” the church while the other party sought to “re-found” the church. If Protestants have developed an anti-historical attitude, it has been partly in response to polemical circumstances. A way out of current Protestant provincialism, particularly in American fundamentalism, may be found in studying the reformers' original, more positive, attitude towards church history. / Dissertation (MA (Church History))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Church History and Church Policy / MA / unrestricted

Settlement is a frequent topic in scholarly conversations about early American literature. From studies about William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation to Anne Bradstreet's poetry, settlement is a consistent theme in texts written by early Americans and in scholarship written by experts about early American texts. Settlement is also a major theme in the poetry written by Eliza R. Snow after fleeing with the Latter-day Saints from Missouri and settling in Nauvoo, Illinois. Both Bradstreet and Snow lived through settlement crises, crises that incorporated and exacerbated religious tensions within their communities eventually taking the form of the Antinomian Controversy and the Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844. The poetry left behind by Bradstreet and Snow is often an overlooked archive of historical sources that gives its readers insight into how these women responded to the crises within their communities and how feminine virtue played a role in their settlement crises. In light of this, in this paper I combine recent scholarship that focuses on Mormon settlement with scholarship that complicates the narratives about prominent women in Mormon history to unearth new insights into the lived experiences of Mormon women during settlement crisis. I borrow this move from scholars of early American history who have done this for a long time and have similarly uncovered new discoveries into the women that they study. Given that we now understand things that the Puritans did not fully--namely, that women are complex and that their historical images are often posthumously determined by archives (often controlled by powerful men)--I pay specific attention to the similarities of how settlement affects Puritan and Mormon women, both in their present-tense and in the historical narratives about them. Focusing on the intersection between settlement and women helps us to understand female writers, the way that women endured settlement, and the way that settlement affected the gender and overarching politics of their communities. Most notably, examining this intersection gives scholars insight into the ways that women writers--such as Anne Bradstreet and Eliza R. Snow--discipline their own narratives and leave behind poetical archives in order to be remembered as virtuous and well-behaved women, while the women who did not leave an archive are more susceptible to the narrative control of powerful men over historical archives.