Puritan New England

This is Unit Four of American Literature, part one of two: Puritan New England, and a body of writing that almost nobody meant as literature. Unit three closed on the question of who holds the pen. Here the pen is held by people who believed their private lives were public evidence, and that is this unit's governing idea, which part two pays off. The Puritans came to build a purified church and to be watched while doing it, so they produced sermons, histories, diaries, captivity narratives and private poems rather than novels or plays. Everything they wrote sits inside four propositions about God and humanity, and the habit those propositions produced is the one to watch: a concrete domestic fact, a burnt trunk or a hard crossing, turned into a doctrinal claim inside two sentences. This part takes the doctrine first, then the two founding texts, Winthrop's sermon and Bradford's history, then the poet who performs the doctrinal correction and lets you hear what it costs her. By the end you will be able to state the four Calvinist doctrines. To explain typology and the plain style as choices. To place Winthrop's sermon and say why its famous phrase is a burden. To describe Bradford's history and its organizing principle. And to account for Bradstreet's poems and the argument inside them.

Four entries on the ground: why these people wrote at all, the doctrine underneath it, and the two habits that doctrine produced.

Five forms, and no fiction.

AML 0301 The Puritan Errand and the Literature It Produced

Puritans came to New England to build a church purified of what they saw as Catholic remnants, and to be watched while they did it. That errand produced sermons, histories, diaries, captivity narratives and private poems rather than novels or plays, and the exam draws heavily on all five. The period's best writing was not meant as art.

Four propositions, holding everything else.

AML 0302 Calvinism in Four Doctrines

The Puritans were strict Calvinists, and the anchor gives the core of it: God is all-powerful and completely sovereign, all humans are naturally depraved, and God elects only a few for salvation. Grace cannot be earned. Everything a Puritan wrote sits inside those propositions, and election is God's choice rather than any kind of reward.

A life, matched against scripture.

AML 0303 Typology: Reading the World as a Sign

Puritans read events as signs, matching their own lives to scripture, so that a crossing became an exodus, a wilderness became a testing, and a plague became a rebuke. The habit is called typology, and it explains why these writers can move from a burnt house to a doctrine in a few lines. The personal detail is always going somewhere.

Plain by conviction, not limitation.

AML 0304 The Plain Style

The plain style was a deliberate choice: clear, unornamented prose that would not distract a congregation from doctrine. Its instruments are the concrete example, the numbered division and the scriptural quotation. Ornament was suspected as vanity, so the writing is spare by conviction rather than by inability. Plainness here is a theology and not a taste.

Five entries on the founding texts: a sermon delivered at the crossing, a history organized by providence, and a second eyewitness.

A governor preaching at the crossing.

AML 0305 John Winthrop and "A Model of Christian Charity"

Winthrop, a Cambridge-trained lawyer, was chosen governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company in sixteen twenty-nine and held the office for twenty years. Sailing on the Arbella in sixteen thirty, he delivered "A Model of Christian Charity", imagining a community knit together in which the rich may not eat up the poor. The sermon argues community rather than individual liberty.

Watched, and answerable for it.

AML 0306 "A City Upon a Hill"

The sermon's most quoted sentence tells the colonists they shall be as a city upon a hill, with the eyes of all people upon them. The warning follows at once: deal falsely with God and they will be made a story and a byword. The image is a burden, and the famous phrase arrives inside a threat.

Separatist, exile, passenger, governor, historian.

AML 0307 William Bradford and *Of Plymouth Plantation*

Bradford, a Yorkshire farmer's son, joined the Scrooby Separatists, fled with them to the Netherlands, and sailed from Southampton on the Mayflower in sixteen twenty. Bound for Virginia, they landed at Plymouth instead. His history covers the years to sixteen forty-seven and defined the settlement for later generations. Separatists left the English church, where Puritans stayed inside it.

Weather and death, read as dealings.

AML 0308 Providence as a Narrative Principle

Bradford's history is organized by providence: storms, illnesses, harvests and deaths appear as God's dealings with a chosen people rather than as accidents. The method gives the book its shape and its confidence, and it is why a Puritan historian records a hostile settler's death as a judgment. Providence is the history's argument rather than its background.

The other voice from one company.

AML 0309 Edward Winslow and the Pilgrims' Departure

Edward Winslow, one of the Plymouth leaders, wrote an account of how the Pilgrims sailed from Delfshaven, printed in sixteen forty-six. His narrative supplies the departure scene that Bradford's history compresses, and it is the other first-hand voice from the same small company. Two eyewitnesses, one settlement, and different emphases between them.

Seven entries on the colony's poet: a manuscript carried to London without her, and four poems that argue with their own conclusions.

The board's first question describes her.

AML 0310 Anne Bradstreet: The First Published American Poet

Anne Bradstreet sailed on the Arbella with her husband Simon and her father Thomas Dudley, both of them officers of the colony. She wrote from childhood in ambitious forms, including quaternions on the four elements, the humors, the ages and the seasons, learning from Sidney, Spenser and Donne. The board's first sample question describes her.

Carried to London by a relative.

AML 0311 *The Tenth Muse* and Its London Publication

Bradstreet may not have meant to publish at all. Her brother-in-law John Woodbridge carried the manuscript to London, where it appeared as *The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America*, the anchor dating it sixteen fifty-one and calling it the first book of poetry published by an American. The board says the sixteen fifties, and the sources vary.

The book as a badly dressed child.

AML 0312 "The Author to Her Book"

In this poem of sixteen sixty-six Bradstreet addresses her published volume as an ill-formed child snatched from her side by friends and exposed in print. She washes its face, stretches its joints, and finds that the defects increase as she works. The apology is a conventional form; the mother's exasperation inside it is not.

Two made one, valued above gold.

AML 0313 "To My Dear and Loving Husband"

Bradstreet's best-known poem, printed in sixteen seventy-eight, opens by declaring that if ever two were one, then surely they were. It values the marriage above whole mines of gold and the riches of the East, and it ends by asking that they persevere so that they may live ever. Earthly love had to square with heaven.

A will, written in couplets.

AML 0314 "Before the Birth of One of Her Children"

Written about sixteen fifty, this poem addresses her husband in expectation of a childbirth she might not survive. It arranges her affairs in verse: she asks to be remembered, asks him to protect their children from a stepmother's harms, and offers the poem itself as the thing that survives her. Maternal death was an ordinary expectation.

The inventory, and then the correction.

AML 0315 "Upon the Burning of Our House"

After her home burned in sixteen sixty-six Bradstreet wrote verses walking through the loss room by room, naming the trunk, the chest, and the table where guests had sat. She then corrects herself, calling the goods mere dust and turning to a house on high erected by the mighty architect. The correction is doctrine; the inventory is grief.

Doctrine wins; feeling keeps the middle.

AML 0316 Bradstreet's Quarrel With Her Own Consolations

Bradstreet's best poems record an argument she is having with herself. Doctrine says the world is dust, and affection says the house, the husband and the children are precious. She resolves the argument in her last lines and lets a reader hear what the resolving cost her. The difficulty of that resolution is the poem's real subject.

Three entries to close the part: a minister writing poems for no reader, his strangest figure, and the attack that produced a bestseller.

Poems written for no reader.

AML 0317 Edward Taylor and the Private Meditations

Edward Taylor emigrated in sixteen sixty-eight rather than swear loyalty to the Church of England, studied three years at Harvard, and served a frontier parish. He wrote *Preparatory Meditations* and *God's Determinations* for himself rather than for print, and his poems stayed unpublished for two centuries. The work was recovered long after his death.

A soul asking to become machinery.

AML 0318 "Huswifery" and the Metaphysical Conceit

Taylor read Donne and Herbert, and wrote what the anchor calls metaphysical poetry: intellectual, built from unexpected metaphors, incongruous imagery, puns and paradoxes. In "Huswifery" he asks God to make him a spinning wheel and a loom, so that grace weaves the cloth his soul will wear. The conceit's oddness is the whole point of it.

A garrison burns, a woman is taken.

AML 0319 Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and Restoration

In sixteen seventy-six the frontier town of Lancaster was attacked during the conflict the colonists called King Philip's War, after Metacomet of the Wampanoags. Mary Rowlandson, a minister's wife, was taken with twenty-three other survivors, held for weeks, and then ransomed. Metacomet is the name that was his; King Philip was theirs for him.

That is the doctrine and the founding texts. Part two takes what the captivity became, and the century that followed. You can state the four Calvinist propositions every text in this unit sits inside, a sovereign God, a naturally depraved humanity, an election given to few, and a grace that cannot be earned, and you can voice them as the Puritans held them. You can explain typology, the habit of matching a life to scripture, and the plain style, which is spare by conviction rather than by inability. You can place Winthrop's sermon on the crossing, argue that it asks for community rather than liberty, and show that the city upon a hill arrives inside a threat about becoming a story and a byword. You can describe Bradford's history as providence organizing weather and mortality into God's dealings with a chosen people, with Winslow as the second eyewitness. And you can account for Bradstreet, whose manuscript went to London without her and whose poems list a burnt house room by room before calling it dust. Part two opens on the numbered removes.