Puritans have always been troublesome. In their own day, they were impatient and prickly agents of change. And after they faded away, their legacy became the subject of constant debate, not only in the British Isles, but in the United States as well. Puritans also fell prey to facile caricaturing. In our own day, their image as grim, self-absorbed, self-righteous, intolerant workaholics is all too familiar to anyone who was forced to read Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in high school or Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in college. And younger folk who are now encountering Puritans through the New York Times's “1619 Project” or any other such revisionist history spawned by our Great Awokening are bound to have an even more negative caricature indelibly etched in their imaginations—one that depicts Puritans as avatars of the worst traits bequeathed to the world by Western...
Puritans: A Transatlantic History
Carlos Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and professor of religious studies at Yale University. His memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana received the American National Book Award in Nonfiction and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His other books include a second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami; Reformations: The Early Modern World, which won the R. R. Hawkins Award from the Association of American Publishers; War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin; From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain; The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila; and A Very Brief History of Eternity.
Carlos Eire; Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Common Knowledge 1 January 2022; 28 (1): 151. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-9713675
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