the puritans errand into the wilderness reconsidered

Berkeley, and author, most recently, of After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History, who recently shared his own perspective on Miller’s legacy on this blog. The roundtable discussion will be led by David Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History, U.C. “The future of scholarship on Puritanism,” I had written, “resides in the ability of historians to revisit the Puritans with the same sense of intellectual urgency Miller possessed over half a century ago.” Now, five years later, as I look ahead to this year’s S-USIH Annual Conference, I eagerly await a plenary session that promises to do exactly that.

Just this past week, in a walk down memory lane, I reread my first historiographical essay on Miller and his interlocutors. The more I read, however, the more I came to admire Miller’s ability-however much I agreed or disagreed with his particular insights or oversights-to make a compelling case for why the Puritans mattered. I digested nuanced revisions by Philip Gura, Theodore Dwight Bozeman, and Stephen Foster of Miller’s arguments that, for example, a proto-American sense of exceptionalism was present throughout New England Puritanism. I was drawn to studies that used the Puritans to better understand commerce, sexuality, conflict, and science in colonial America. I found compelling scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s that approached American Puritanism through a trans-Atlantic lens, looking more to England and English Puritanism for insights into its New England counterpart. I spent hours reading and rereading “Errand into the Wilderness.” For days, nearly everywhere I went, I carried with me The New England Mind, attempting to understand Miller just a bit better than I had the day before.Īs I read deeper into Puritan historiography, I balanced my initial awe with more critical assessments of Miller’s work. Within mere minutes of beginning graduate school (or so it felt then), I encountered Perry Miller for the first time. This post arises in her capacity as a member of the 2016 S-USIH Conference Committee. Candidate in the Department of History at Stanford University, and a 2015-2016 Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow in the Stanford Humanities Center. Today’s post comes courtesy of Claire Rydell Arcenas.

The puritans errand into the wilderness reconsidered