Volume 31, Number 9 · May 31, 1984
Heaven Can't Wait
By Edmund S. Morgan
The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression
by Patricia Caldwell
Cambridge University Press, 210 pp., $19.95
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
by Kenneth Silverman
Harper and Row, 479 pp., $29.95
The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession. For as long as professional scholarship has existed in the United States its practitioners have devoted themselves to analyzing in ever-increasing detail and sophistication the ideas and activities of a set of people whom many Americans would like to forget. Part of the reason may be that the Puritans left behind so full a record of what they thought and did that scholars cannot resist the temptation to make the most of it. But in all fairness there is more to it than that. Quite apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself. In recent years the focus has shifted from theology to experience, from doctrine to devotion, and the results have been rewarding.
Review, 2198 words
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