UC Berkeley

The present monograph initiates the lapsed possibility that Puritanism in the New World was an endpoint, rather than an origin, by contextualizing Puritan cognitive and literary styles within a history of the “craft of thought” that stretched from antiquity to the Renaissance. New England divines Thomas Hooker, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards, I argue, applied imagistic, linguistic, and mathematical models for thought in an effort to meet the vexed imperative of moving closer to God in a predestinarian theology that held one’s grace had already been determined. Why acts of thinking should serve to navigate this explicitly Puritan ordeal, I also contend, proceeds from the fact – largely unrecognized by either Puritan studies or cognitive literary studies – that many of the fields we today designate as cognitive sciences were first understood as cognitive arts. Plotting a correspondence between acts of creative thinking and a distinctly Puritan concept of grace, I show that the Puritans were radially more creative than we may have realized, precisely because they forged out of a long and diverse intellectual heritage an art – what I term a ‘cognitive style’ – that mediated between intellection, representation, and belief.

Memorial, copious, and infinitary ‘styles of thinking,’ I contend, discern American Puritanism at the juncture of British intellectual history, Anglo-American lived experience, and Calvinist doctrine. When first-generation New England divine Thomas Hooker uses both imagistic and dialectic models for the memory to explain the spiritual potency of recollection, he composes what was known as the doctrine of preparation as a memorial art. To read preparation as this cognitive style is to grasp how the program joined intellection and grace. When Cotton Mather collates ecclesiastical and personal confessions with the conclusions of a 1662 Massachusetts synod, he models copia to insist that the synod’s expansion of church membership was not dangerous innovation but a recombination of orthodox policy. Mather’s use of this style reconceives the Halfway Covenant as a literary rather than socio-political event. And Jonathan Edwards, trying to staunch social ills flowing from revivals in the Connecticut Valley that had become ungovernable, appealed to contradictory accounts of the infinitesimal to reconcile the Calvinist tenets of predestination and conversion. Grounding his responses to the revivals in this mathematical epistemology, Edwards evinces a knowledge of God that was both Enlightened and Awakened, because it took the form of a leap between mystery and sense. Tracing these intellectual movements and the corollary literary modes they imparted across Hooker’s sermon literature, Mather’s ecclesiastical history, and Edwards’ philosophical theology, I show that a Puritan theology of grace comes into view when we attend to the style Puritanism engendered, both of rhetoric, and through rhetoric, of thought.