To Live Ancient Lives
The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism
By Theodore Dwight Bozeman
424 pp., 6 x 9
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Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-9627-3
Published: January 2011 -
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-0009-3
Published: January 2014 -
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6522-9
Published: January 2014
Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
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Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Taking their bearings from a special past, Puritans were not concerned with the future in a modern sense. The Great Migration was not intended as an errand to reform the world or inaugurate the millennium, but as a flight to a free world in which long-lost biblical rules and ways could be reinstituted.
Drawing on hundreds of sermons and tracts, Bozeman demonstrates how the search for the long-lost helps to identify Puritanism as a discrete order within Protestant dissent, and he locates that movement within the larger spectrum of restorationist Christian movements and of Western mythology.
Originally published in 1988.
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About the Author
Theodore Dwight Bozeman is professor of religion and history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought.
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Reviews
"Bozeman offers a major corrective to current views of American Puritanism that locate in the settlement of New England the beginnings of a progressivist dynamic later associated with the 'American Way.' All scholars of early American history and culture must wrestle with his arguments."--Philip F. Gura
"Bozeman has provided a valuable reappraisal of the forces which drove Puritan ideology in New England. . . . His analysis challenges in a new way an idea which has shaped many recent studies: that New England's Puritanism was forward-looking, 'straining towards modernity' and the fashioning of American nationhood. . . . [This] book presents a stimulating and controversial revaluation."--Ecclesiastical History