Reviews of Books

The study of popular religion in Puritan New England has come of age in the past two decades, with recent scholarship addressing issues as diverse as female piety, the family, devotional practices, sectarianism, and the occult. Historians working on the eighteenth century, by contrast, continue to plow conventional fields: biographies of prominent clergymen, the demographics of the Great Awakening, and connections between religion and Revolution. But not Erik R. Seeman; he carries the historiographical innovations of Puritan scholarship forward into the provincial period. The result, Pious Persuasions, is a suggestive book that deserves careful study by all students of early American religion and popular culture.	1
Seeman begins where David D. Hall's award-winning Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (New York, 1989) ends—in the early eighteenth century. Employing a host of manuscript diaries, letters, and church records, he explores the gradual process by which an increasingly assertive New England laity grew ever more distant from learned ministers. The core of the study revolves around four thematic chapters that examine popular attitudes toward death and dying, the contested meanings of meetinghouse rituals, the persistence of magic and religious heterodoxy, and the continuities of eighteenth-century revivalism.	2
Seeman paints a vivid portrait of a remarkably lush religious landscape. Provincial New England remained an enchanted world in which ordinary people scanned the heavens for signs of supernatural displeasure and employed the counter-magical services of cunning folk. Unable to restrain their parishioners' occult interests, eighteenth-century clergymen vied for control of traditional ritual spaces such as the deathbed, but in many cases, lay experience failed to square with the clergy's "sanctioned scripts" (p. 67). Indeed, few parents willingly entertained the possibility that their ailing infants would burn in hell; the dying occasionally received dreams and visions fully assuring them of salvation. Women preserved medieval notions of baptism, believing that the sacrament would protect their young ones from temporal misfortune and secure them a place among the saints. Rituals of church admission and the Lord's Supper revealed similar tensions, as the laity placed a distinctive stamp on venerable New England worship practices.	. . .