Revising dominant accounts of Puritanism and challenging the literary history of sentimentalism, Sympathetic Puritans 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 command 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.
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.
Reviews
“In graceful writing that rehearses predecessors while advancing knowledge, Sympathetic Puritans will prompt readers to look anew at the book’s historical actors and time period, stimulate debates for other areas of American Studies, and facilitate discussions that will energize students at all levels.”
— Matthew P. Brown, The American Historical Review
“Abram C. Van Engen’s consideration of Calvinist sympathy and fellow feeling reshapes our under- standing of Puritan emotional discourse and of canonical early American texts.”
— Lisa M. Gordis, American Literature
“[Sympathetic Puritans] succeeds both in building a case for the centrality of sympathy to the Puritan way of life and in presenting a more human picture of the Puritans. Van Engen’s Puritans are a people rigorously committed to a partisan view of the world but one equally committed to building communities of unity and significance.”
— Wilson Brissett, Early American Literature
“Sympathetic Puritans represents a largely successful effort to portray the Puritans as they understood themselves and their enterprise. Van Engen’s scholarship is sound, thoroughly researched, and marked by a sensitive, sympathetic analysis of abundant evidence testifying to the centrality of this facet of Puritan experience. The Puritans emerge from this interpretation as very human figures striving, despite their obvious failures, to build families and communities marked by mutual affection.”
— Timothy D. Hall, The Journal of American History
“Van Engen has produced a cogently argued and remarkably well-written book that helps those of us who teach about the Puritans explain to students how New Englanders could actually live in such a relentlessly religious society ... With his deft portrayal of the Puritans as warm-blooded individuals with hearts as well as heads, Van Engen invites readers to bestow a little sympathy on people often dismissed as cold and unforgiving.”
— Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England Quarterly
“In Sympathetic Puritans, Van Engen finds that the unity and coherence of Massachusetts’s city on a hill also depended on something less tangible than a carefully calibrated church or civil government. It depended on “an imaginative reciprocation of affections that involved putting oneself in another’s place and feeling as that person felt” … His study contributes to the ongoing work of humanizing the puritans and plots a new genealogy of sentimentalism by illustrating how the techniques puritans used to write about sympathy “would later be strongly identified with the sentimental tradition” in American literature.”
— Neil T. Dugre, William and Mary Quarterly
“Van Engen’s gracefully written study, both original and informed, is a pleasure and a provocation. His reframing of some of early America’s most studied moments requires that readers press a kind of reset button on familiar, even iconic, texts and moments. Puritan sympathy invites a reconsideration of the essential meaning and influence of Puritan sensibility—not on “America” or the “American self,” but on reader and genre, particularly as a precursor to the novel.”
— Eileen Razzari Elrod, American Literary History