Review by Choice Review
Drawing upon extensive research in primary materials, Bozeman (University of Iowa) offers a major and long-overdue reinterpretation of Puritanism. Arguing convincingly that Puritans in both England and the US did not see themselves as embarked on a future-oriented, modernizing, "errand into the wilderness" that would culminate in John Winthrop's often-cited "city on a hill" but were instead seeking "an avenue of return to a sacred past," Bozeman raises fundamental questions about some of the theses advanced by such eminent Puritan scholars as Perry Miller, Edmund S. Morgan, and Sacvan Bercovitch. Rejecting the validity of a continuing human-invented tradition, the Puritans saw their own movement through time as requiring them "to strive without rest for reconnection with the paradigmatic events and utterances of ancient and unspoiled times," and to revert "to the first, or primitive order of things narrated in the Protestant scriptures." Bozeman provides an invaluable corrective to the practice of automatically tracing the American ideas of progress and modernization back to Massachusetts Bay, and he suggests that additional research may find even more evidence that a perspective toward the past was as important in American thought as an orientation toward the future. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -J. P. Felt, University of Vermont
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
