Abstract

This work aims at revising the common notion that Puritanism in America succumbed rapidly and finally to the twin advances of empiricism and enlightenment. A survey of the production, transmission, and maintenance of certain scholastic theories of communication and covenant forms of belief indicates, rather, that Puritan modes of thought possessed a remarkably long life here. Puritan dogmas never gained a firm foothold in England, but the establishment of Ramist pedagogies in New England and the relative absence of countervailing discourses there did insure that certain metaphysical axioms of Ramism would survive in the colonies. So, the writings of Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, and Edward Taylor can all be seen as tending to Jonathan Edwards's philosophical theology of cosmic excellence. The work of Edwards, in turn, influences in identifiable ways the religious rhetoric of the Great Awakening and, indeed, nineteenth-century American evangelical belief at large