Afterword

Summary

The Afterword brings together the contributions of the individual chapters in this collection and draws out what they have in common. It explains the shift in puritan studies through what does not appear (American exceptionalism, typology, and jeremiads), and it maps the current state of the field through two dueling frameworks: the puritan imaginary and the puritans’ world. The “puritans’ world” designates the way that historical, circumstantial, interconnected people and events affected how the puritans came to their ideas and how those ideas came to be written down. The “puritan imaginary” means the ideas themselves – the ways in which puritans tried to make sense and meaning out of the world in which they lived. Puritan literature requires scholars who come at the subject through both perspectives – those who seek to see as the puritans saw and those who look askance at puritan literature for the world that kept intruding and reshaping it. As the Afterword makes clear, that principle of combined perspectives is on full display in the book’s collection of essays, which revisit puritan literature from multiple angles of vision.