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List of members in 15th-
In the mid-seventeenth century, persons on both sides of the Atlantic wishing to join a Puritan church had to appear before all of its members and tell the story of their religious conversion - in effect, to give convincing verbal evidence that their souls were saved. This book explores the testimonies of spiritual experience delivered by puritans in the mid-seventeenth century in order to qualify for membership of their local churches.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of ordinary women and men experienced evangelical conversion and turned to a certain form of spiritual autobiography to make sense of their lives. This book traces the rise and progress of conversion narrative as a unique form of spiritual autobiography in early modern England. After outlining the emergence of the genre in the seventeenth century and the revival of the form in the journals of the leaders of the Evangelical Revival, the central chapters of the book examine extensive archival sources to show the subtly different forms of narrative identity that appeared among Wesleyan Methodists, Moravians, Anglicans, Baptists, and others. Attentive to the unique voices of pastors and laypeople, women and men, Western and non-Western peoples, the book establishes the cultural conditions under which the genre proliferated.
August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members’ relationship to the pious stories of the “last hours,” the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them. A learned, insightful work by one of the world’s leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.
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.
This book is a study of English conversion narratives between 1580 and 1660. Focusing on the formal, stylistic properties of these texts, it argues that there is a direct correspondence between the spiritual and rhetorical turn. Furthermore, by focusing on a comparatively early period in the history of the conversion narrative the book charts for the first time writers’ experimentation and engagement with rhetorical theory before the genre’s relative stabilization in the 1650s. A cross confessional study analyzing work by both Protestant and Catholic writers, this book explores conversion’s relationship with reading; the links between conversion, eloquence, translation and trope; the conflation of spiritual movement with literal travel; and the use of the body as a site for spiritual knowledge and proof.
This rhetorical study of the persuasive practice of English Puritan preachers and writers demonstrates how they appeal to both reason and imagination in order to persuade their hearers and readers towards conversion, assurance of salvation and godly living. Examining works from a diverse range of preacher-writers such as William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter and John Bunyan, this book maps out continuities and contrasts in the theory and practice of persuasion. Tracing the emergence of Puritan allegory as an alternative, imaginative mode of rhetoric, it sheds new light on the paradoxical question of how allegories such as John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress came to be among the most significant contributions of Puritanism to the English literary canon, despite the suspicions of allegory and imagination that were endemic in Puritan culture. Concluding with reflections on how Milton deploys similar strategies to persuade his readers towards his idiosyncratic brand of godly faith, this book makes an original contribution to current scholarly conversations around the textual culture of Puritanism, the history of rhetoric, and the rhetorical character of theology.
This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography.
No one was more surprised than Andrew Klavan when, at the age of fifty, he found himself about to be baptized. The Great Good Thing tells the soul-searching story of a man born into an age of disbelief who had to abandon everything he thought he knew in order to find his way to the truth. Best known for his hard-boiled, white-knuckle thrillers and for the movies made from them--among them True Crime and Don’t Say a Word--bestselling author and Edgar Award-winner Klavan was born in a suburban Jewish enclave outside New York City. He left the faith of his childhood behind to live most of his life as an agnostic until he found himself mulling over the hard questions that so many other believers have asked: How can I be certain in my faith? What's the truth, and how can I know it's the truth? How can you think, live, and make choices and judgments day by day if you don't know for sure? In The Great Good Thing, Klavan shares that his troubled childhood caused him to live inside the stories in his head and grow up to become an alienated young writer whose disconnection and rage devolved into depression and suicidal breakdown. In those years, Klavan fought to ignore the insistent call of God, a call glimpsed in a childhood Christmas at the home of a beloved babysitter, in a transcendent moment at his daughter's birth, and in a snippet of a baseball game broadcast that moved him from the brink of suicide. But more than anything, the call of God existed in stories--the stories Klavan loved to read and the stories he loved to write. Join Klavan as he discovers the meaning of belief, the importance of asking tough questions, and the power of sharing your story.
A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.