Darkness falls on the land of light : experiencing religious awakenings in eighteenth-century New England /

Since the 1980s, American religious historiography has undergone a series of transitions, moving from study of institutional histories and ecclesiastical developments to study of lay religious sentiments that led progressively to a privatizing of religious faith and the democratizing of revivals. The reports of Jonathan Edwards and other famed clerics give only part of the story. Personal diaries, letters, devotional writings, and other works written by laypersons fill in the narrative, giving equal, if not greater, historiographic voice to private spiritual struggles. This is Winiarski's topic in this masterful (and massive) Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, a book that marks the zenith of the new historiography. Winiarski (Univ. of Richmond), in well-polished storytelling, weaves together multilayered biographies of believers seeking spiritual refreshment and by turns finding in New England's established religion a font of joy or an empty, arid, and spiritless desert. Winiarski documents how truly intense were the spiritual lives of colonial men and women who determined to keep vital their godly walk. In this sense, the Great Awakenings did less to awaken than they did to affirm and direct the many seeking revival in their lives and in their land. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Jon R. Stone, California State University, Long Beach