The Puritans: A Sourcebook of their Writings by Perry Miller

Puritan fashion is hot! No kidding. A top designer recently announced the resurgence of the Puritan doily! Yes, that white thing around Richard Sibbes’ neck is coming back. [Once for a college video project to portray John Winthrop I cut a neck hole in a table doily. Yes, there are pictures of me sportin’ the thing. No, you’ll never see them.]

There is more to the Puritans than hip doily fashion. So who were they? This question receives a great deal of answers but one book relinquishes definition of Puritan culture to the words of the Puritans. The book is titled The Puritans: A Sourcebook of their Writings (Dover: 2001) edited by Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson.

Perry Miller (1905-1963) was a professor at Harvard and is remembered as a fine Puritan scholar and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Narrowed specifically on the American Puritans, this 1,000 book is loaded with original source writings and helpful introductions covering the true Puritan in their manners, customs, behaviors, poetry and their thoughts on art, education, politiks and science. It provides a fascinating background in the search to understand true Puritan culture.

Here are a few choice cuts from the intro:

“Without some understanding of Puritanism, it may be safely said, there is no understanding of America … In the mood of revolt against the ideals of previous generations which has swept over our period, Puritanism has become a shining target for many sorts of marksmen. Confusion becomes worse confounded if we attempt to correlate modern usages with anything that can be proved pertinent to the original Puritans themselves. To seek no further, it was the habit of proponents for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment during the 1920’s to dub Prohibitionists ‘Puritans,’ and the cartoonists made the nation familiar with an image of the Puritan: a gaunt, lank-haired kill-joy, wearing a black steeple hat and compounding for sins he was inclined to by damning those to which he had no mind. Yet any acquaintance with the Puritans of the seventeenth century will reveal at once, not only that they did not wear such hats, but also that they attired themselves in all the hues of the rainbow, and furthermore that in their daily life they imbibed what seem to us prodigious quantities of alcoholic beverages, with never the slightest inkling that they were doing anything sinful. … if first of all we wish to take Puritan culture as a whole, we shall find, let us say, that about ninety per cent of the intellectual life, scientific knowledge, morality, manners and customs, notions and prejudices, was that of all Englishmen … They were not unique or extreme in thinking that religion was the primary and all-engrossing business of man, or that all human though and action should tend to the glory of God.”

This book is not Cross-centered but very useful in illustrating the Puritan Cross-centered spirituality existed within a cultural sensitivity to art, politiks, education, science and the world around them. Very useful to confront the caricature that the Puritans were dry, culturally withdrawn and excessive zealots.