In the American tradition, the great pioneer of Puritan studies, Perry Miller, continues to delimit the scope of scholarship. His argument for the sermon was built upon an impressive foundation of intellectual history: an account of rhetoric and logic training in the English university, the fine points behind irresolvable theological controversies, and, throughout, a sense that the Puritan—that inimitable dinosaur of inflexible spirituality—was nevertheless the Ur-American. Subsequent generations have enacted their inevitable adjustments to Miller, but Miller’s explanation of the working of the “New England Mind” has always been plausible enough to remain foundational. The notion of a monolithic New England Mind has been shattered, thankfully, and replaced with a more accurate understanding of many New England Souls, not all white, not all male, not all elite, and not all Puritan. But this newer, savvier scholarship continues to explain away Puritanism as theological, sociological, and cultural idiosyncrasy. From Miller on down, Puritanism has often appeared as a puzzling historical chapter that, for better and worse, gives clues to future manifestations of American character and foible.
By contrast, much scholarship on English Puritanism has traditionally focused on literary aspects of the phenomenon, although arguably not on the literariness of the sermon per se. Rather, as Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter Mc-Cullough point out in their introduction to The English Sermon Revised, studies of English Puritanism throughout the twentieth century served primarily to contextualize John Milton as the Poetic Puritan, on the one hand, and John Donne as the Metaphysical Poet Preacher (in opposition to plain style), on the other. The result has disproportionately featured, in their words, “the history of English prose style, antiquarian literary history, and a preoccupation with ‘the Metaphysical.’”7 For the past few decades, English scholarship has usefully blurred old theological and stylistic lines of distinction between the Anglican and the Puritan, and every new book, it seems, must begin by worrying the question, What is a Puritan? That question is perhaps easier to answer in New England, where one could argue that a Puritan is anyone who felt strongly enough about the current situation to get on a boat.8 Nevertheless, American scholarship could benefit from more regard to the ambiguities of doctrine and style. On either side of the Atlantic, however, a plausible claim to “the Literary” continues to elude the study of the Puritan sermon. We talk about experience, about mourning, about social control and transgression, about piety and resistance. We speak about the many phenomena of Puritanism. Conveniently, then, we can remind ourselves that literature might consist of not only a poem or a play but a controversial pamphlet or a catechism or a report on missionary activity, as well. We can turn almost anything—from a visual image, to a historical event, to a devotional practice—into a text to read. Yet none of these necessary and illuminating expansions of Puritan literature has addressed recalcitrant resistance to that more traditional literary genre of the sermon for modern readers. Most of us still hate to read sermons—and Puritan sermons in particular. While we can argue that sermons are literature, we do not always feel the necessary truth of those arguments.
We make a mistake when we concede the premise that Puritan writers are rote rhetoricians and dogmatists who are constantly responding to circumstances: to the curious exigencies of Reformation politics and culture, to the vicissitudes of the early Stuart regime, to exile, to migration, to heretical threats from within a community of Visible Saints.9 This premise characterizes Puritans as a reactive, proscriptive sort of people, led by an unwieldy theology and not enough latitude for creative innovation. They do not appear to us as constructive theorists of their own literary output; they are too busy justifying their untenable religious positions. And, in actuality, guidelines for sermon composition (such as William Perkins’s Arte of Prophecying and Richard Bernard’s The Faithfull Shepheard) do not offer particularly sophisticated theories of composition or language.10 On their surface, directions for plain-style preaching—enticingly called “prophesying”—come off rather like the instructions on a pastoral shampoo bottle: “Open scripture, present doctrine, apply doctrine, repeat. …” In the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practice, “prophesying” meant something much closer to basic textual explication (close reading scripture, that is) rather than inspired speech. Certainly, a good minister (or a “godly minister,” as he might be called) was understood to be specially enabled by God to speak, but he was also dependent upon years of training in the university disciplines of logic and rhetoric.11 Ironically, methodical plain-style preaching (straightforward scriptural explication that moves directly toward practical application and avoids rhetorical flourish for its own sake) is associated with those very theologians who reject other potentially rote practices (such as set prayer and prewritten homilies) as idolatry.12 Indeed, the reified, seemingly uninspired formula of prophesying or “opening scripture” in the plain style appears to be at odds with the radical potential inherent in the Reform commitment to the vernacular and the direct working of faith in the process of salvation.
To the extent that Puritans are perceived as having literary theory, that theory is usually characterized as essentially antiliterary and hostile to familiar genres such as poetry and drama. Not only do Puritans close down all the theaters in England first chance they get, but they reject all the artful preaching of, say, John Donne or Lancelot Andrewes. To adapt H. L. Mencken’s dismissive formulation, the Puritan writer becomes someone who lives with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is spinning an extended metaphor with eloquence and wit. When Puritans write poetry, doctrine often seems to take precedence over eloquence, and so the Bay Psalm Book limps its way awkwardly across the page, and Michael Wigglesworth’s notorious Day of Doom parades its vision of final judgment in doggerel fourteeners. In such light, the famous claim from the preface to the Bay Psalm Book, reminding the reader that “God’s altar needs not our polishing,” seems more like an excuse than a poetic principle.13 In such light, the saving, textual vitality of the sermon seems lost forever beneath the implausible hyperbole of Puritan anecdote.
Perhaps we must begin by conceding that the sermon is the controlling logic of all Puritan literature. Central to the lived experience of piety, sermon culture dictates not only habits of thought but habits of interpretation and expression as well. Illustrated perhaps most famously by John Winthrop’s Modell of Christian Charitie, this sermonic habit of thought manifests itself in civic discourse. Winthrop’s little speech aboard the Arabella and his closing explication of Matt. 4:15 (“a City upon a Hill”) inaugurate centuries of debate over the relationship between church and state as well as constantly evolving tropes of exceptionalism. Non-sermonic prose and poetry often appear distinctly inflected with sermonic tone, structure, and technique, adding to the distinct generic fluidity that characterizes much canonical Puritan writing. Notably, Mary Rowland-son’s captivity narrative demonstrates multiple literary genres simultaneously. The preface offered “Per Amicam” frames Rowlandson’s personal account of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God in terms of the covenantal relationship of the entire community with God. A minister’s wife and a member of a New England gathered church, Rowlandson did not need Increase Mather’s clerical instigation to appropriate features of the sermon for the narration of her experience. For Rowlandson—as for any New England Puritan attendant upon the sermon as the “ordinary means” to salvation—it would have been difficult not to have explicated biographical insight alongside scriptural revelation or to have sought resolution of unmanageable trauma without doctrine. Rowlandson explicates Job, Daniel, and David into contiguous identity with her own experiential exposition of self. She systematizes what is perhaps the most irreconcilable aspect of her ordeal—her anger at the English army’s ineffectual attempts at rescue—through the familiar rhetorical technology of numbering “a few remarkable passages of Providence; which I took special notice of in my afflicted time.”14 Scripture and doctrine are not imposed upon Rowlandson’s experience from the outside; rather, they arise naturally in the course of exegetical habit.
We might also recognize in Puritan poetry generally the sermonic logic and exegetical habits that help negotiate tensions endemic to a life of visible sanctity: between doctrinal resolution and contingent experience