Puritanism and Its Discontents

Abstract

Transatlantic in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, this volume works to restore both a radical edge and a new specificty to the much-debated definitions of Puritans amd Puritansim. Ranging from the 1622 election of a new master at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to Oliver Cromwell's self-fashioning, to the uses of the Turk in anti-Puritan polemic to Anne Hutchison and the Antinomian crisis, the ten essays offer a richly 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 longstanding 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. Laura Lunger Knoppers is Professor of English and Director, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, at the Pennsylvania State University.