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Beginning with the first colonists and continuing down to the present, the dominant narrative of New England Puritanism has maintained that piety and prosperity were enemies, that the rise of commerce delivered a mortal blow to the fervor of the founders, and that later generations of Puritans fell away from their religious heritage as they moved out across the New England landscape. This book offers a new alternative to the prevailing narrative, which has been frequently criticized but heretofore never adequately replaced. The authors argument follows two main strands. First, he shows that commercial development, rather than being detrimental to religion, was necessary to sustain Puritan ...
Jeffrey Hammond's study takes an anthropological approach to the most popular form of poetry in early New England - the funeral elegy. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to a specific process of mourning defined by Puritan views on death and grief. The elegies emerge, he argues not as 'poems' to be read and appreciated in a post-romantic sense, but as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience of loss in accordance with theological expectation. Read in the framework of their own time and place, the elegies shed light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture. Hammond's book reassesses a body of poems whose importance on their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours. It represents the first full-length study of its kind in English.
Focuses on America's premier colonial poet, Edward Taylor (1642-1729) within a theological context. Offers new insights into the meaning of his poems and sermons and assesses his position in English and American literary traditions from this perspective.
When the young minister-poet Edward Taylor moved to Westfield, Massachusetts, in November of 1671, he had written several poems. When he died there fifty-eight years later, in addition to thousands of sermons and more than 2,000 manuscript pages of original prose, he had composed some 40,000 lines of poetry. For two of his poetic projects in particular, Taylor is considered - with Anne Bradstreet - one of British North America's most accomplished poets. Daniel Patterson's Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations and Preparatory Meditations: A Critical Edition reconsiders the texts of Taylor's two major works for the first time since Donald Stanford's 1960 edition. This volume also offers the first complete text of all the Meditations that Taylor transcribed into his Poetical Works manuscript. The restoration of Taylor's text, however, is the most enduring value of this edition, which is designed to become the new standard edition of these poems. The scores of substantive variants and the hundreds of variants in matters of punctuation and capitalization existing between the Patterson and Stanford texts are fully reported in the back of the volume, as are all editorial emendations. Ulti
Now considered America's foremost colonial poet, Edward Taylor was virtually unknown until some of his poems were discovered in the Yale library and published in 1937. The intellectual brilliance and the emotional intensity of his poetical meditations have led critics to compare him to John Donne and George Herbert. These poems are now recognized as one of the great achievements in American devotional literature.