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Reviews of Books
Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall. By Judith S. Graham. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 283. $40.00.)
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The diary of Samuel Sewall has long been recognized as providing an unparalleled window on the world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Boston. Scholars have regularly drawn on it to illustrate various aspects of religious, economic, and everyday life, perhaps no one as skillfully as David Hall in his explorations of the mental world of Sewall. Yet the very richness of the diary marks Sewall as exceptional and cautions us about generalizing too much from his experience. |
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Judith Graham is aware of this danger and has chosen to use the Sewall diary not to build her own generalizations about colonial domestic relations but rather to test the generalizations advanced by others. Puritan Family Life traces the evolution of Sewall's family from his marriage to Hannah Hull through the birth and upbringing of their children, the education of their sons and daughters, and the marriages of those children to the relations between Sewall and his adult children and his grandchildren. In the process Graham addresses issues such as the relations between husbands and wives, how Puritans conceived of childhood, the purpose of sending out and taking in children, and attitudes toward death. |
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