Sympathetic Puritans

Revising dominant accounts of Puritanism and challenging the literary history of sentimentalism <em> Sympathetic Puritans</em> argues that a Calvinist theology of sympathy shaped the politics religion rhetoric and literature of early New England. Scholars have often understood and presented sentimentalism as a direct challenge to stern and stoic Puritan forebears; the standard history traces a cult of sensibility back to moral sense philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment not Puritan New England. Abram C. Van Engen has unearthed pervasive evidence of sympathy in a large archive of Puritan sermons treatises tracts poems journals histories and captivity narratives. He demonstrates how two types of sympathy -- the active <em>command</em> to fellow-feel (a duty) as well as the passive sign that could indicate salvation (a discovery) -- permeated Puritan society and came to define the very boundaries of English culture affecting conceptions of community relations with Native Americans and the development of American literature. <p/>Van Engen re-examines the Antinomian Controversy conversion narratives transatlantic relations Puritan missions Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative -- and Puritan culture more generally -- through the lens of sympathy. Demonstrating and explicating a Calvinist theology of sympathy in seventeenth-century New England the book reveals the religious history of a concept that has previously been associated with more secular roots.<br>