Puritan New England

This is Unit Four of American Literature, part two of two: what the captivity was made to mean, the trials that split the colony, and the preacher who closed the period. Part one ended with Mary Rowlandson taken from a burning garrison at Lancaster. The unit's governing idea now pays off, because what she does with that experience is the Puritan move in its clearest form: a private ordeal turned into public evidence of how God deals with a soul. She divides the march into numbered removes, and the numbering itself is the argument. From there the unit takes the colony at its worst and its most self-correcting, in the Salem trials, where a judge who sat on the court later stood in church while his recantation was read aloud, and the colony's most learned minister wrote the book defending the proceedings. Then the man Massachusetts expelled, who wrote a Narragansett phrasebook that argues for the people who speak it. Then Jonathan Edwards, a century on, holding a congregation over a fire with a spider and spending a career arguing that grace is something felt. And then two procedures that put the whole unit onto an exam passage. By the end you will be able to explain the removes. To place Sewall and Mather on opposite sides of Salem. To account for Roger Williams. To describe Edwards's sermon and the philosophy behind it. And to read a Puritan passage for its doctrine and name which of the three forms it is.

Four entries on the colony under pressure: a captivity given a shape, a court that executed twenty, and the dissenter it had already expelled.

Numbered stages, read as trial.

AML 0320 The Removes: Structure as Spiritual Record

Rowlandson divides her captivity into numbered removes, each one a stage of the journey away from home. The device turns a forced march into a pilgrimage, and it lets every hardship be read as a trial permitted by God. The structure is the book's argument about what the ordeal meant, because the numbering makes suffering legible as providence.

A judge's apology, read aloud.

AML 0321 Samuel Sewall's Diary and *The Selling of Joseph*

Samuel Sewall, a Harvard graduate and Boston merchant, sat as a judge at the Salem trials and later stood in church while his recantation was read out. His diary records births, deaths, courtship and public life across decades, and his *Selling of Joseph* argues against slaveholding from scripture. The witness counts twenty people executed at Salem.

The learned man defends the court.

AML 0322 Cotton Mather and *The Wonders of the Invisible World*

Cotton Mather, son of Increase and grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton, entered Harvard at twelve and graduated in sixteen seventy-eight. His *Wonders of the Invisible World* defended the Salem proceedings and gathered up the evidence for witchcraft that the court had accepted. The trials ran from sixteen ninety-two into ninety-three.

A phrasebook that is a defence.

AML 0323 Roger Williams and the *Key Into the Language*

Roger Williams, a London merchant's son who had been Sir Edward Coke's stenographer and taken a Cambridge degree, was expelled from Massachusetts and founded Rhode Island. His *Key Into the Language of America* is a Narragansett phrasebook that argues for the people who speak the language. Expulsion made him the colony's first dissenter.

Five entries to close: the century's last great preacher, the mind behind the famous sermon, two procedures, and the unit's capstone.

A spider held above a flame.

AML 0324 Jonathan Edwards and "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"

Edwards preached his best-known sermon in seventeen forty-one, during the revivals. It holds a congregation over a pit with the image of a spider suspended above a fire, insisting that nothing but God's unobliged hand keeps them from falling. The argument is Calvinist and the method is sensory, and that famous image is an argument about grace.

A naturalist, a philosopher, a preacher.

AML 0325 Edwards Beyond the Sermon

Before his teens Edwards refuted materialism and wrote a study of the flying spider, and he entered Yale at thirteen. He read Locke's *Essay Concerning Human Understanding*, which grounded knowledge in experience, and argued from it that grace is felt as well as believed. The sermon is famous, and the philosophy matters more.

Event, interpretation, choice, parallel.

AML 0326 Reading a Puritan Text for Its Doctrine

A Puritan passage on the exam is answered by tracing its doctrine, and four steps do it. One: find the event, which is usually concrete and domestic, a fire, a birth, a capture, a voyage. Two: find the sentence that interprets the event, which will arrive within a few lines and will attribute it to God's hand, either as mercy, as trial, or as judgment. Three: name which of those three the writer has chosen, because that choice is the passage's claim and the exam's answers are built from it. Four: check for a scriptural parallel, since typology matches a writer's experience to a biblical one, and a wilderness or an exodus or a Job-like affliction named in the passage tells you what pattern the writer claims to repeat. Do not read the concrete detail as mere colour. The burnt trunk, the numbered remove and the spider over the fire all exist to carry the doctrine, and an answer that stops at the image will miss the claim.

The pronoun and the tense decide.

AML 0327 Telling Sermon From Diary From Narrative

Three Puritan forms appear on the exam and each has a signature. A sermon addresses a present congregation as we or as you, takes a scriptural text and divides it, and moves toward application, which is what Winthrop's and Edwards's pieces both do, though one persuades and the other frightens. A diary records dated, disconnected entries in the first person, mixes the public and the domestic without transition, and makes no argument, and Sewall's is the type. A narrative tells a continuous past-tense story with a beginning and a restoration, organizing itself by stages as Rowlandson's removes do. The quick test is the pronoun and the tense: present-tense address is a sermon, dated past-tense fragments are a diary, and a continuous past-tense story is a narrative. A history like Bradford's looks like a narrative and behaves like an argument, since providence supplies the causation.

What later writers argue with.

AML 0328 The Puritan Legacy: What Later Writers Inherit

Puritan New England produced a body of writing almost nobody meant as literature, and the exam asks about it because the assumptions inside it run through American writing for two centuries. The doctrine came first: a sovereign God, a naturally depraved humanity, an election nobody earns. From that came typology, the habit of reading one's own life as a repetition of scripture, and from typology came the characteristic move of turning a concrete domestic fact into a doctrinal claim in two sentences. Winthrop sets the pattern, telling the colonists they will be a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people on them, which is a promise and a threat in one image. Bradford writes a history with providence as its organizing principle, so weather and mortality become God's dealings with a chosen people. Rowlandson divides a forced march into numbered removes so captivity can be read as trial. Sewall keeps a diary that records a judge's public recantation beside his domestic life, and Mather defends the court Sewall came to regret. Edwards, a century on, holds a congregation over a fire and then spends a career arguing that grace is felt. Against all of them stands Bradstreet, performing the same doctrinal correction and letting a reader hear the cost. What later American writing takes from this period is not the theology but the instruments: the self-examining first person, the conviction that private experience carries public meaning, the errand that makes a nation answerable, and the plain style. Two cautions. The Puritans were a minority even in New England, and the doctrine here is voiced as they held it rather than as the course's view.

That closes the Puritans, and with them the exam's oldest material. You can explain how Rowlandson's numbered removes turn a forced march into a pilgrimage and make suffering legible as providence. You can place Samuel Sewall, who sat on the Salem court and later stood in church while his recantation was read aloud, and who argued against slaveholding from scripture, opposite Cotton Mather, who gathered the evidence the court had accepted into a book defending it, with the witness counting twenty executed. You can account for Roger Williams, expelled from Massachusetts, founder of Rhode Island, and author of a Narragansett phrasebook that argues for the people who speak it. You can describe Edwards holding a congregation over a fire with a spider, and know that the sermon is famous while the Locke-grounded argument that grace is felt matters more. And you can take any passage in this period through four steps to its doctrine, and tell a sermon from a diary from a narrative by the pronoun and the tense. Unit five takes the Enlightenment.