On Errand into the Wilderness

Woof, this is a difficult read.

Throughout the mid-20th century, Perry Miller was probably the premier scholar on Puritan America, and he advised students who sought to pursue the same discipline—Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan are probably the two most prominent. This collection of essays can be seen as the culmination of Miller’s work, and he puts forth a coherent picture of Puritan New England after some 25 years of study. However, given the depth in which he engages with the topic, this is not and introductory book.

Through this text, Miller engages closely with Puritan state and society, and the importance of theology shines through this work, painting Puritan leaders fundamentally as intellectuals first and governors second. Major names of colonial New England can be found throughout the book—John Winthrop is here, so is Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards, and William Bradford. To me, the most interesting chapter was the one that gives the book its title, “Errand into the Wilderness,” although “Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Connecticut” and “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity” are also captivating.

While reading this, I found myself constantly looking back at Wikipedia. While the movers and shakers of late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century American history are all quite familiar to me, the figures, events, and themes depicted here are not. American history courses in the US tend to give a bit of attention to the development of colonial Virginia and colonial Massachusetts (more often, Plymouth, over the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which Miller has some interesting thoughts on—Plymouth is far easier to make sense of than Massachusetts) before leaping to the Salem Witch Trials and then the Seven Years War. This is a shame, as seventeenth (and early eighteenth) century Anglo-America was dynamic and had a lot going for it that ought to be better understood. That said, I still don’t quite understand it, and only further study will rectify that.

This is a great book, but it needs to be supplemented with other works. Two of Edmund Morgan’s books, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop and Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea, helped give me a bit more context for what was taking place here, but they weren’t enough. I’m looking forward to reading a bit more on this topic.