Memory’s Ends: Thinking as Grace in Thomas Hooker’s New England

Abstract

This essay examines the role of memory in the theology of first-generation New England divine Thomas Hooker. Drawing particular attention to Hooker’s application of imagistic and dialectical mnemonics in his well-known but controversial doctrine of “preparation,” it discovers a Puritan theory of grace that sought to come closer to God by escaping idolatrous thinking, on the one hand, and mechanistic cognition, on the other. Reconceiving Hooker’s preparation as a memorial style and placing that ars memoria at the center of transatlantic Puritan controversies about grace, the essay provides a new model for reading Puritanism not as the start of an American telos but at the end of a European intellectual inheritance.