Essays on Puritans

Jonathan Edwards straddled two definitive eras in American history: the hardline beliefs of the Puritans he was raised by in the Connecticut Valley and the freethinking, logical reasonability of the Age of Enlightenment (Norton Anthology 396). These ideas are blended fascinatingly in Edwards’s Personal Narrative,...

In the long essay, “A Defense of Poesy,” Sir Philip Sidney responds to the attempts of repression by the Puritan Movement on poets and their work by characterizing poetry as the roots of culture and intelligence. Sidney uses mythical allusions and historical references to various...

“The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving and “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne are both short stories that illustrate Puritan ideas about the place of evil in human nature. Both short stories revolve around a central character and his personal struggle with the...

Within “The Triumph of the Reformed Religion in America,” Cotton Mather represents his roots of Puritanism as well as transitioning towards more enlightenment thought. His essay centers on a minister named Eliot who seeks to save the natives by means of learning their language (Mather...

In reading the incredibly moving text of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, a detailed narrative of Mary Rowlandson’s eleven week captivity among Narragansett Indians, one cannot help but become aware of the presence of two distinct and alternating narrative voices throughout the body of...

The puritans were a member of a group of English Protestants of the late 16th and 17th centuries who regarded the Reformation of the Church of England under Elizabeth as incomplete and sought to simplify and regulate forms of worship. Back in those days the...

Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, Johnathan Edwards was a graduate from Yale and a Prime Minister in his later years at a church in Massachusetts. Edwards soon became a powerful preacher, delivering sermons resulting in numerous conversions and help sparking the Great Awakening, a religious...