Abstract
Can we consider the Sublime to be an early-modern notion? Of course we can, as Cheney (2018) has proved in his review of the Sublime in early-modern England. What has rarely been interrogated, though, is the connection between the Sublime, feminism, and Puritan theology. Our article is divided into two sections: in section one, we provide a critical and historical overview of the natural Sublime in Puritan theology by relying on the writings of the Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather; in section two, we investigate the contemporary legacy of the Puritan Sublime and its relationship to feminism in The Witch (2015).
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Notes
- 1.
Arthur Miller, The Crucible (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2015), Act I.
- 2.
Longinus, On the Sublime (circa 1 CE), quoted in Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 68.
- 3.
David L. Sedley, Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), p. 153.
- 4.
Patrick Cheney, English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime: The Fictions of Transport in Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 10.
- 5.
Cotton Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium: directions for a candidate of the ministry (London: R. Hindmarsh, 1789), p. 105.
- 6.
Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (London: Orion Publishing, 2015), p. 60.
- 7.
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (London: Belknap Press of Havard University Press, 1956), p. 11.
- 8.
Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Voyage to War, Ebook (London: Harper Perennial, 2014), n.p.
- 9.
Sacvan Bercovitch, “New England Epic: Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana,” ELH 33 (1966), p. 344.
- 10.
David B. Morris, Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in eighteenth-Century England (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015), p. 3.
- 11.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), p. 98.
- 12.
Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World. OBSERVATIONS As well Historical as eological, upon the NATURE, the NUMBER, and the OPERATIONS of the DEVILS (London: Benjamin Harris, 1693), p. 42.
- 13.
Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1761), p. 58.
- 14.
Alan Heimert, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” The New England Quarterly 26 (1953), p. 371.
- 15.
Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New-England (Hartford, Connecticut: Silas Andrus & Son, 1858), p. 51.
- 16.
Bonnie Mann, Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 47.
- 17.
Richard Godbeer, The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 193.
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Corcoran, M., Di Carlo, A. (2021). “The Devils Territories”: Nature, the Sublime, and Witchcraft in the Puritan Imagination and Robert Eggers’s The Witch. In: Hagberg, G.L. (eds) Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_7
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