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A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (Jefferson Memorial Lectures) PDF

177 Pages·1966·12 MB·English
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by Peter Gay| 1966| 177 pages| 12| English

About A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (Jefferson Memorial Lectures)

A Loss of Mastery is an essay on Puritan history in early America. By examining the major historical works of leading Puritans – Williiam Bradford, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards – the book reveals the historical and philosophical preconceptions, as well as the intellectual style, of these writers. Schooled in the Augustinian tradition, they thought of history as static and subservient to theology, as a chronicle of the plausible, familiar, and dramatic.As a European historian, Gay brings an added perspective to his subject. In a series of illuminating comparisons, he contrasts the thinking of the Puritan historians with the dynamic and critical historiography of the Renaissance humanists. Although the humanistic assessment of historical causation was later challenged, we recognize the origins of the modern in the Renaissance view that man alone makes his own fate. In the hands of the Puritans, however, history becomes an account of a people who had uprooted themselves not to discover, but to protect or even justify, their identity. Bradford’s work was part of a Protestant campaign to capture the Augustinian past by establishing the historical credentials of the Reformation; Mather reduced critical moments in Puritan society to a series of personal crises; and Edwards’ history made religious propaganda by arousing awed memories of a religious myth. Ultimately, the failure of their historical writings reflects the larger fajlure of the Puritan mission in the New World.In the light of the appreciative rediscovery of American Puritanism by the ‘Harvard historians’ – Samuel Eliot Morison, Kenneth Murdock, and Perry Miller – Gay’s thesis must be controversial. This controversy is perhaps best exemplified in Gay’s concluding bibliographical essay – a penetrating discussion of the historians of American Puritanism, both those with whom he agrees and those with whom he disagrees.A Loss of Mastery is an expanded version of the Jefferson Memorial Lectures given at the University of California at Berkeley in April, 1966.

Detailed Information

Author:Peter Gay
Publication Year:1966
ISBN:9780520004566
Pages:177
Language:English
File Size:12
Format:PDF
Price:FREE
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