Abstract
There was a time when the title ‘Puritanism and Emotion’ would have seemed like the set-up for a weak joke. Fortunately, the study both of Puritanism and of the history of the emotions has long ago passed that point. It no longer needs to be said that Puritans had emotions, nor indeed that their emotional range extended beyond lugubrious malice. The purpose of the chapters in this volume is only incidentally to display the variety, complexity and vigour of Puritans’ emotional lives — although any readers who still doubt that will find ample evidence of it here. The reason for assembling a volume such as this is, rather, to raise a series of deeper and, we believe, more fruitful questions about Puritans and their emotions. What kinds of emotional patterns were characteristic of Puritanism? What did Puritans understand their emotions to be? What, indeed, did they desire them to be and what work did those emotions do for them? How did they deal with, and discipline, emotions which did not sit neatly with their ideals? How did they cultivate emotions in relationships with their family and friends as well as with God?
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Notes
J. Coffey and P.C.H. Lim, ‘Introduction’ in J. Coffey and P.C.H. Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
For the classic account of this struggle, see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). On the ‘Novationist’ tag and its implications for the earliest origins of Puritanism, see
Robert Harkins, ‘Elizabethan Puritanism and the Politics of Memory in Post-Marian England’, Historical Journal, 57 (2014): 899–919.
Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).
Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1999), 325.
David George Mullan, Scottish Puritanism 1590–1638 (Oxford University Press, 2000);
W.R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge University Press, 1992);
Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier 1600–1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungry and Transylvania (Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. Chapter 6.
W.B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England (Oxford University Press, 2014).
John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), esp. 7–8.
Ann Hughes, ‘Anglo-American Puritanisms’, Journal of British Studies, 39 (January 2000): 1–7.
Eugene E. White, Puritan Rhetoric: The Issue of Emotion in Religion (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972).
John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991);
cf. Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013), 27–39.
Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2011);
Elizabeth Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
Tom Schwanda, Soul Recreation: The Contemplative-Mystical Piety of Puritanism (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012).
Douglas Davies, Emotion, Identity, and Religion: Hope, Reciprocity, and Otherness (Oxford University Press, 2011);
John Corrigan (ed.), Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 2004).
Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997);
Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (eds), Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013);
Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Mary Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading the Anatomy of Melancholy (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Charles Hambrick-Stowe, ‘Practical Divinity and Spirituality’ in Coffey and Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, 204; cf. Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), ix.
Dewey D. Wallace, Jr., The Spirituality for the Later English Puritans: An Anthology (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), xvii.
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© 2016 Alec Ryrie & Tom Schwanda
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Ryrie, A., Schwanda, T. (2016). Introduction. In: Ryrie, A., Schwanda, T. (eds) Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490988_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490988_1
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