Abstract
In 1669, the New England farmer Joseph Tompson cared for his wife through a serious illness. During this difficult time, he reflected on his spiritual state. His journal reveals a strong view of providence, or the direct action of God in human and natural events. It also shows the significance of affliction as a diagnostic of the heart in puritan culture. Tompson wrote:
I took notis in mine owne hart that my spirit was secretly disquieted under the disposeing hand of god. I found my spirit very confused under this aflicion if that I did atend meditacion, I found it verye hard to be in the dutye, fearfull I was that I did not get good by the aflicion & therefore I thout it would not spedily be removed. Sometimes I found sweet refreshing from the word but it did not long continue.1
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Notes
Joseph Tompson, Journal, February 1669, Ms. Am 929, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Tompson became a militia captain as well as a deacon and town Selectman. For more on the Tompson family, see Kenneth Murdock, Handkerchiefs from Paul (New York: Garrett Press, 1970), xvi–xvii;
Charles Francis Adams, History of Braintree, Massachusetts (Braintree: Riverside Press, 1891), 14–21; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702), III, 119–20;
Matthew P. Brown, ‘The Thick Style: Steady Sellers, Textual Aesthetics, and Early Modern Devotional Reading’, PMLA, 121(1) (2006): 78–9.
Donald E. Stanford, ‘Introduction’ in Donald E. Stanford (ed.), The Poems of Edward Taylor (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), xxxiv. Michael J. Colacurcio writes that Thomas Shepard’s ‘odd preference for affliction may or may not suggest a certain religious masochism’: ‘“A Strange Poise of Spirit”: The Life and Deaths of Thomas Shepard’, Religion & Literature, 32(1) (2000): 12;
Francis Sypher, ‘The “Dayly Obseruation” of an Impassioned Puritan: A Seventeenth-Century Shorthand Diary Attributed to Deputy Governor Francis Willoughby of Massachusetts’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 91 (1981): 101. Philip Greven finds puritan roots in an evangelical temperament ‘dominated by a persistent and virtually inescapable hostility to the self and all of its manifestations’: The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Meridian, 1979) 12. David Leverenz sees puritan self-examination as evidence of their ‘obsessive-compulsive personality’ stemming from their ‘relatively anxious, distant, weak, or repressive fathers’:
David Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 3. An earlier generation of scholars, including Perry Miller and Geoffrey Nuttall, laid the groundwork for the study of puritan spirituality:
Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), Chapters 1–2;
Geoffrey Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), Chapters 4–5.
One of the most important contributions of affect theory is to connect ‘emotion’ to its many-layered and diffuse contexts: Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 12, 16–17;
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 8.
For a defence of ‘experimental knowledge’ in the spiritual realm, see Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises (London, 1603: STC (2nd edn)/21215), 278–9. See also Flatley, Affective Mapping, 2–3; David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989), 10, 19–20, 168;
Michael McGiffert, God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge, 2nd edn (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 10.
For an example of two families’ negotiations of medicine and providence, see David Harley, ‘The Theology of Affliction and the Experience of Sickness in the Godly Family, 1650–1714: The Henrys and the Newcomes’ in Religio Medici (London: Scolar Press, 1997), 273–92.
Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 23;
T. Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 74, 90;
Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2–3, 8–20;
Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7–9, 18–19.
Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins, in Works of Thomas Shepard, vol. II (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1853), 141–2.
Owen Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Shocken Books, 1972), 65; see also 76–81, 126–8. On suffering and providentialism, see
Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 122–3;
J. Sears McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), Chapter 2; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 228;
Michael McGiffert, God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 5–6; Walsham, Providence, 15–20;
Belden C. Lane, Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 135.
Charles Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 36–7. Norman Fiering sees this vigorous attention to the emotional life as in part a reaction to late sixteenth-century Neo-Stoicism:
Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press/Omohundro Institute, 1981), 151–7. Sarah Rivett finds extensive evidence for the close relationship between puritan efforts to map Christian experience and early modern natural philosophy and empiricism:
Sarah Rivett, Science of the Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press/Omohundro Institute, 2011), 37–9. See also Ryrie, Being Protestant, 20–22;
Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 140.
William Perkins, A Golden Chaine (London, 1600: STC (2nd edn)/19646), 128–9. Calvin also treated dealing rightly with afflictions, or ‘Bearing the Cross’, as a branch of self-denial: Institutes of the Christian Religion, Henry Beveridge (trans.) (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1846), Book III, Chapter 8. There is also some discussion of God’s afflicting work in Book I, Chapter 17 on ‘Use to be Made of the Doctrine of Providence’. For an overview of the English devotional manuals on affliction, see Ann Thompson, The Art of Suffering and the Impact of Seventeenth-Century Anti-providential Thought (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003); and McGee, Godly Man in Stuart England, Chapter 2.
Becon, Sycke Mans Salve, 82–3, 403. Ronald Rittgers has explored the earlier process by which Protestants ‘rejected the coupling of suffering and salvation in traditional penitential theology and piety’: Ronald Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7, 81–3, 146–7.
Shepard, Ten Virgins, 275, 285, 290–91, 299; Michael Colacurcio, Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 387–9; Watkins, Puritan Experience, 9–14. This elaboration of the work of the Holy Spirit into an expectation of ‘experiential immediacy’ had developed in puritanism from the 1570s onwards in parallel to a rising concern about hypocrisy. See
Norman Pettit, A Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 103.
Shepard, Ten Virgins, 348–9; Bartlett Jere Whiting, Early American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 33.
Shepard, Ten Virgins, 290–91, 349. For another paradigm of thorough repentance, see Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 156–8.
Sermons: manuscript, 1689, 7r–7v, MS Am 974, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Meredith Neuman, Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 94; Ryrie, Being Protestant, 53–4.
Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8–11;
Martha Finch, Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 171–2.
Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, Jeannine Hensley (ed.) (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 242, 257, 241, 292.
Talal Asad, ‘Agency and Pain: An Exploration’, Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1(1) (2000): 31–2, 40–41, 47–8.
Cotton Mather, A faithful man, described and rewarded (Boston, 1705), 26; E. Brooks Holifield, Era of Persuasion (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 91.
James Cudworth to Dr John Stoughton, in Everett Emerson, Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629–1638 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 139–40.
John Winthrop to Margaret Winthrop, 9 September 1630, in John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, James Savage (ed.), 2nd edn (Boston Little, Brown, 1853), Appendix 47, 452.
John Winthrop to Margaret Winthrop, 8 May 1629, in Winthrop, History of New England, Appendix 25, 429; Francis Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 193–4, 281–3.
John Endicott to John Winthrop, from Salem, 2 February 1639/40, in Winthrop Papers, IV, 188–9. See also John Endicott’s letter to John Winthrop in his sickness, c. January 1635/6 in Winthrop Papers III, 221–2. In contrast, Edmund Morgan characterises Winthrop as primarily success-oriented, arguing that Winthrop’s arguments for emigrating ‘were those of a man accustomed to success and intending to have more of it’. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1958), 38–9.
Benjamin Lynde to his sister Sarah, from the ‘Papers of Judge Lynde’, c. 1689, in Fitch E. Oliver (ed.), The Diaries of Benjamin Lynde and Benjamin Lynde, Jr (Boston: [Priv. print.], 1880), 1–2. See also Cosby, Suffering and Sovereignty, 108–11.
For a full treatment of this point, see Brad Walton, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, and the Puritan Analysis of True Piety, Spiritual Sensations, and Heart Religion (Lewiston: Mellon, 2002), 57; Fiering, Moral Philosophy, 158–66.
Rutherford to Lady Kenmure, 26 June 1630 and 15 November 1633, in Thomas Smith (ed.), Letters of Samuel Rutherford (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1881), 381, 397. See also
John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 82–90; and Todd, Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, 160–63. For an example of early modern Lutheran consolation literature, see Ronald K. Rittgers, ‘Grief and Consolation in Early Modern Lutheran Devotion: The Case of Johannes Cristoph Oelhafen’s Pious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement (1619)’, Church History, 81(3) (2012): 601–30.
Raymond A. Anselment, Royalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 14. For a comparison of puritan and other Anglican responses to suffering, see McGee, Godly Man in Stuart England, 57–65; Thompson, Art of Suffering, 26–8, 44.
Thomas Cartwright to D.B., 1575, 1576, in Albert Peel and Leland Carlson (eds), Cartwrightiana (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951), 105–8.
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Weimer, A.C. (2016). Affliction and the Stony Heart in Early New England. 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_6
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