Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism

Abstract

Jenny Franchot did not live even to see this book begin, but her intellectual spirit is the driving force behind it. Thanks, Jenny.There was a time not too long ago when it looked like this book would never be more than an infrequently accessed folder on a desktop. It was at all times, during those difficult years, a frequently accessed source of self-pity. So I would like to thank the friends of Bill W. for seven years of teaching me about humility, accountability, and the importance of helping others. The late Tim Liddiard extended a hand when I really needed it.The Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada provided generous funding that enabled me to undertake research at the Boston Public Library, the Huntington Library, the Friends House Library, London, and the British Library. The Centre for American Studies at the University of Western Ontario also provided generous support that enabled me to attend conferences, and to spend intellectually and spiritually stimulating time, again at the Friends House Library in London, in the late winter of 2010, and then again at the British Library in March of 2014. Thanks especially to Christine Wall and Donald Abelson at the Centre.Sarah Rivett and Stephanie Kirk invited me to attend the conference "Religious Transformations in the Early Americas" at Washington University in Saint Louis in the spring of 2009, where I delivered some material from this manuscript. I would like to thank them and all of the attendees of that event for their encouragement, which gave me some much needed confidence to finish a first draft of this. At that conference and at others, Jonathan Beecher Field, Lisa Gordis, and Laura Stevens have been particularly valued friends to me and this work.

“A Monster of iniquity in my self”: Queer Sacramental Temporality in Thomas Shepard and Michael Wigglesworth

“…Bryce Traister has observed that Wigglesworth's "sexual life authenticates and makes possible the drama of his own salvific narrative." 46 Indeed, Wigglesworth's recording of his sexual life pushes his private salvific narrative into a region unauthorized by what we would assume are viable models of a puritan's public piety. torment of "carnal concupiscence" and "lust" make him finally admit to himself that "marriage wil be necessary," he marries on May 18, 1655.…”

Toward a Postsecular Eighteenth Century

“…Scholars of early American literature provide the most trenchant critiques thus far of the secularization thesis. Bryce Traister observes the ways in which piety and secularism were intertwined from the seventeenth century forward. Sarah Rivett shows how empiricism enabled a new discourse of religious inquiry in colonial New England: “Grace…came to be conceived of as having a traceable, mappable nature that, were it to be identified upon human souls, could be treated as empirical evidence” (46).…”