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The New England Mind
The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
The New England Mind: From Colony to Province is one of Perry Miller's masterworks, exploring the intellectual history of the Puritans through a deep investigation of the thought of the Puritan divines. In this book, as well as its predecessor The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Miller asserts a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system.
Originally published 1953.
Originally published 1953.
513 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1953
About the author
Perry Miller
64 books23 followersPerry Gilbert Eddy Miller was an intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and one of the founders of what came to be known as 'American Studies'. Alfred Kazin once referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history."
In his most famous book, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), Miller adopted a cultural approach to illuminate the worldview of the Puritans, unlike previous historians who employed psychological and economic explanations of their beliefs and behavior.
At Harvard, he directed numerous PhD dissertations; among his most notable students were historians Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan. Margaret Atwood dedicated her famous book The Handmaid's Tale to Perry Miller. He had been a mentor to her at Harvard.
His major works included:
• (1933) Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650
• (1939) The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
• (1949) Jonathan Edwards
• (1953) The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
• (1953) Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition
• (1956) Errand into the Wilderness
• (1956) The American Puritans [editor]
• (1957) The American Transcendentalists, their Prose and Poetry
• (1957) The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville and the New York Literary Scene
• (1958) Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto “Lost Journal”
• (1961) The Legal Mind in America: from Independence to the Civil War
• (1965) The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War
In his most famous book, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), Miller adopted a cultural approach to illuminate the worldview of the Puritans, unlike previous historians who employed psychological and economic explanations of their beliefs and behavior.
At Harvard, he directed numerous PhD dissertations; among his most notable students were historians Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan. Margaret Atwood dedicated her famous book The Handmaid's Tale to Perry Miller. He had been a mentor to her at Harvard.
His major works included:
• (1933) Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650
• (1939) The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
• (1949) Jonathan Edwards
• (1953) The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
• (1953) Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition
• (1956) Errand into the Wilderness
• (1956) The American Puritans [editor]
• (1957) The American Transcendentalists, their Prose and Poetry
• (1957) The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville and the New York Literary Scene
• (1958) Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto “Lost Journal”
• (1961) The Legal Mind in America: from Independence to the Civil War
• (1965) The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 5, 2020
Someone on Perry Miller’s Wikipedia entry dug up a quote from an obscure essay about another topic altogether to claim that “the dark conflicts of the Puritan mind eroded his own mental stability.” Miller drank himself to death in 1963, not yet sixty years old, and the event was hailed as a major loss to American intellectual history. He produced many books but “The New England Mind,” his two volume work on the intellectual world of the Puritan settlers, probably stands as his magnum opus.
Miller’s work here has the thoroughgoingness of the Puritan, and his radicality, in the sense of getting to the root of things. He spends hundreds of pages on foundation work, most notably in the first volume, where he excavates the logical, scholastic framework of the thinking of the first generation of Puritan leaders in New England. We hear a lot about the medieval scholastic tradition, with which the Puritans tinkered but did not dispense with until everyone else did, and a whole lot about Peter Ramus, the French Huguenot logician who sought to displace Aristotle as king shit logician man. As you might be able to tell from my levity, these chapters took some digesting on my part, but the spadework was spectacular.
The picture of the Puritans that emerges from the first volume is that of a deeply dour kind of cosmic optimist. They finagled their way out of the terrible strictures of Calvinism through the establishment of the Covenant of Grace. This was the idea that God, despite being empowered to and justified in arbitrarily damning and saving whoever He pleases, condescends to make a pact with his believers in the same way men of business (as so many Puritans were) make pacts amongst themselves. Faith would bring salvation, not just for individuals but for the community — the new “city upon the hill” of New England — as a whole. The terms of the pact were to be regulated by the (Congregational) church- you couldn’t just go off and make the deal on your own. This way, Miller tells us, the Puritans navigated between the Scylla of Arminianism (the idea that good works could bring about salvation, more or less, a Calvinist no-no) and the Charybdis of Antinomianism, the idea that salvation was entirely interior, an inner light that redeemed the person totally without need of structures.
My image of the Puritan covenant-based social/theological/intellectual order as depicted by Miller is that of a powerful but delicate engine, capable of great feats of world-building but needing constant tinkering to keep from going off kilter. This helps explain why the Puritan fathers came down so hard on antinomians like Anne Hutchinson, who they saw as threatening the colony with spiritual and hence general anarchy (which some scholars of Puritanism, like Edmund Morgan, came to see as essentially correct in a way Miller avoids). Covenant theology ran into a generational problem- what happens when the children of “saints” i.e. full church members don’t have the right kind of conversion experience, the right kind of faith to become full church members themselves? This was tied in to the question of infant baptism, a serious issue in seventeenth century Protestantism.
Miller leads off the second book with the New England solution to this issue, the Half-Way Covenant. This allowed people to baptize their kids as partial members of the church but not recipients of the full communion. As the name implies, this didn’t really satisfy anybody. People either wanted to stick with the old system, babies be damned (literally?) or, as eventually came to pass on the Connecticut Valley frontier, simply let all adults who professed faith and weren’t notorious sinners take communion. Above and beyond the deeply felt theological issues here, there were political issues at work. The church was the center of the New England town (hence those pretty, plain white frame churches around so many New England town greens), everyone paid to maintain it and magistrates enforced its rules, even once the British government twisted the arms of Massachusetts and Connecticut to allow other sects to worship. At first, the likes of John Winthrop, Increase Mather, and other big names in Puritanism were perfectly fine with a minority of “saints” lording it over everyone else in town. Time eroded that system and their confidence.
Miller might have been the origin of the idea of the Half-Way Covenant as the beginning of the decline of Puritanism… and the beginning of New England looking like America, as he conceived it. The rest of Volume II is a long series of defeats for Puritan orthodoxy, but it’s not as simple as that. In many respects, these defeats — ranging from the loss of control over social hierarchies as capitalism developed to introductions of new models of physics — were encouraged by the beliefs of the Puritan fathers themselves, no strangers to deal-making or broad liberal educations that eventually led to acceptance of a recognizably “modern” economics and science. Miller, while protective of the Puritan genius from its many irreverent critics, doesn’t see the declension away from Puritanism as a bad or good thing in and of itself. It’s part of the construction of an American way that would include Puritan ideas in its DNA but would be its own thing.
For a long time, many Americans saw the Puritans as father figures. For the “filiopietistic” strand of American historiography in the nineteenth century, this meant enshrining them as demigods of wisdom. For the irreverent writers of the early twentieth century, ranging from progressive historians to H.L. Mencken, the Puritans were bad dads- “abusive” wasn’t the language they would’ve used, but certainly to be looked at with scorn. For Miller and the other American Studies writers in midcentury, they had a complex, conflicted — dare I say psychoanalytic — approach to the Puritans-as-father, an appreciation but also an ironic distance (which makes sense- this was the first generation of American university scholars to involve many Jews and other non-WASPs) that seems distant from our own sensibility… but made for some great scholarship. Thick, dense, at times exhausting along with being exhaustive (it reminded me of Pocock’s “The Machiavellian Moment,” both for good and for I’ll), “The New England Mind,” like the achievements of the Puritans, is an impressive piece of work from a perspective that can only now be approached from outside. *****
Miller’s work here has the thoroughgoingness of the Puritan, and his radicality, in the sense of getting to the root of things. He spends hundreds of pages on foundation work, most notably in the first volume, where he excavates the logical, scholastic framework of the thinking of the first generation of Puritan leaders in New England. We hear a lot about the medieval scholastic tradition, with which the Puritans tinkered but did not dispense with until everyone else did, and a whole lot about Peter Ramus, the French Huguenot logician who sought to displace Aristotle as king shit logician man. As you might be able to tell from my levity, these chapters took some digesting on my part, but the spadework was spectacular.
The picture of the Puritans that emerges from the first volume is that of a deeply dour kind of cosmic optimist. They finagled their way out of the terrible strictures of Calvinism through the establishment of the Covenant of Grace. This was the idea that God, despite being empowered to and justified in arbitrarily damning and saving whoever He pleases, condescends to make a pact with his believers in the same way men of business (as so many Puritans were) make pacts amongst themselves. Faith would bring salvation, not just for individuals but for the community — the new “city upon the hill” of New England — as a whole. The terms of the pact were to be regulated by the (Congregational) church- you couldn’t just go off and make the deal on your own. This way, Miller tells us, the Puritans navigated between the Scylla of Arminianism (the idea that good works could bring about salvation, more or less, a Calvinist no-no) and the Charybdis of Antinomianism, the idea that salvation was entirely interior, an inner light that redeemed the person totally without need of structures.
My image of the Puritan covenant-based social/theological/intellectual order as depicted by Miller is that of a powerful but delicate engine, capable of great feats of world-building but needing constant tinkering to keep from going off kilter. This helps explain why the Puritan fathers came down so hard on antinomians like Anne Hutchinson, who they saw as threatening the colony with spiritual and hence general anarchy (which some scholars of Puritanism, like Edmund Morgan, came to see as essentially correct in a way Miller avoids). Covenant theology ran into a generational problem- what happens when the children of “saints” i.e. full church members don’t have the right kind of conversion experience, the right kind of faith to become full church members themselves? This was tied in to the question of infant baptism, a serious issue in seventeenth century Protestantism.
Miller leads off the second book with the New England solution to this issue, the Half-Way Covenant. This allowed people to baptize their kids as partial members of the church but not recipients of the full communion. As the name implies, this didn’t really satisfy anybody. People either wanted to stick with the old system, babies be damned (literally?) or, as eventually came to pass on the Connecticut Valley frontier, simply let all adults who professed faith and weren’t notorious sinners take communion. Above and beyond the deeply felt theological issues here, there were political issues at work. The church was the center of the New England town (hence those pretty, plain white frame churches around so many New England town greens), everyone paid to maintain it and magistrates enforced its rules, even once the British government twisted the arms of Massachusetts and Connecticut to allow other sects to worship. At first, the likes of John Winthrop, Increase Mather, and other big names in Puritanism were perfectly fine with a minority of “saints” lording it over everyone else in town. Time eroded that system and their confidence.
Miller might have been the origin of the idea of the Half-Way Covenant as the beginning of the decline of Puritanism… and the beginning of New England looking like America, as he conceived it. The rest of Volume II is a long series of defeats for Puritan orthodoxy, but it’s not as simple as that. In many respects, these defeats — ranging from the loss of control over social hierarchies as capitalism developed to introductions of new models of physics — were encouraged by the beliefs of the Puritan fathers themselves, no strangers to deal-making or broad liberal educations that eventually led to acceptance of a recognizably “modern” economics and science. Miller, while protective of the Puritan genius from its many irreverent critics, doesn’t see the declension away from Puritanism as a bad or good thing in and of itself. It’s part of the construction of an American way that would include Puritan ideas in its DNA but would be its own thing.
For a long time, many Americans saw the Puritans as father figures. For the “filiopietistic” strand of American historiography in the nineteenth century, this meant enshrining them as demigods of wisdom. For the irreverent writers of the early twentieth century, ranging from progressive historians to H.L. Mencken, the Puritans were bad dads- “abusive” wasn’t the language they would’ve used, but certainly to be looked at with scorn. For Miller and the other American Studies writers in midcentury, they had a complex, conflicted — dare I say psychoanalytic — approach to the Puritans-as-father, an appreciation but also an ironic distance (which makes sense- this was the first generation of American university scholars to involve many Jews and other non-WASPs) that seems distant from our own sensibility… but made for some great scholarship. Thick, dense, at times exhausting along with being exhaustive (it reminded me of Pocock’s “The Machiavellian Moment,” both for good and for I’ll), “The New England Mind,” like the achievements of the Puritans, is an impressive piece of work from a perspective that can only now be approached from outside. *****
February 28, 2018
Perry Miller was not naive. The droll ridicule is probably his most humane and one of his more valuable contributions, beside the insight, complex arguments and sheer depth and breadth of research. He was not one to let Christians take themselves too seriously, and he was right.
April 13, 2014
Perry Miller has a reputation among historians as "the greatest American intellectual historian of the twentieth century." Operating out of Harvard in the American Studies department, Miller had some quirky habits to be sure but he was a very smart individual who could make a fairly simple statement about a historical trend that was truly brilliant. Two examples:
Speaking of the institutionalization of Thanksgiving, he said: "By the time ceremonial gratitude can be channelized into an annual festival, calculated in advance, society is rewarding its own well-doing, not acknowledging divine favor" (19).
Speaking of October 19, 1652, when the General Court of Massachusetts ordained a day of fasting to acknowledge community error and God's justice, Miller said, "Corruption itself now appeared not as a cause but a visitation of wrath" (28).
In THE NEW ENGLAND MIND: FROM COLONY TO PROVINCE, Miller focuses primarily on publicized sermons and public primary sources to get at the New England Way of thinking during the mid seventeenth to mid eighteenth century. As the subtitle suggests (this is Volume 2 of his New England Mind series by the way), this work chronicles the transition of New England from a loose network of colonial settlements to a fairly unique and independent province. New Englanders shifted from their original ideal of being at the center of world affairs--a city upon a hill with ambitions to reform Europe by its moral and societal modeling--to a provincial place content to be on the peripheral fringes of the English empire. There is here an exhaustive synthesis of religious trends steering social and political life in New England communities (controversies over the Halfway Covenant for example). Calvinism's doctrine of predestination figures chiefly to shape the American mind in New England as they evolve from Puritans to Yankees.
(*pgs 3-247 were assigned for my Historiography class; those were the pages I read)
Speaking of the institutionalization of Thanksgiving, he said: "By the time ceremonial gratitude can be channelized into an annual festival, calculated in advance, society is rewarding its own well-doing, not acknowledging divine favor" (19).
Speaking of October 19, 1652, when the General Court of Massachusetts ordained a day of fasting to acknowledge community error and God's justice, Miller said, "Corruption itself now appeared not as a cause but a visitation of wrath" (28).
In THE NEW ENGLAND MIND: FROM COLONY TO PROVINCE, Miller focuses primarily on publicized sermons and public primary sources to get at the New England Way of thinking during the mid seventeenth to mid eighteenth century. As the subtitle suggests (this is Volume 2 of his New England Mind series by the way), this work chronicles the transition of New England from a loose network of colonial settlements to a fairly unique and independent province. New Englanders shifted from their original ideal of being at the center of world affairs--a city upon a hill with ambitions to reform Europe by its moral and societal modeling--to a provincial place content to be on the peripheral fringes of the English empire. There is here an exhaustive synthesis of religious trends steering social and political life in New England communities (controversies over the Halfway Covenant for example). Calvinism's doctrine of predestination figures chiefly to shape the American mind in New England as they evolve from Puritans to Yankees.
(*pgs 3-247 were assigned for my Historiography class; those were the pages I read)
February 2, 2010
Full of insight and anecdote, Miller's sequel to the New England Mind's seventeenth century is rich in detail. Miller's circuitous and circular prose style, while delightful to read, also makes this book longer than it needs to be (and typical of this era of scholarship). It's also important to note that the sources upon which Miller draws is argument consist, solely, of printed material, thus seriously limiting the sphere of his inquiry and skewing his results. (Only a small portion of sermons were published, the majority were circulated in manuscript).
November 10, 2012
Good material but very academic and not for a general audience.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews