Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-mp689 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T08:54:39.216Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 12 - Ritual

from Part II - Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

Kristina Bross
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
Abram Van Engen
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana
Get access

Summary

Long understood as purifying the church by rejecting worship routine and devotional ceremony, pious New England settlers in fact observed formal and informal rituals that defined lived religion within the Reformed tradition. Given that access to the vernacular word was central to puritan self-definition, literacy and reading became intensely ritualized. Thus, along with life-cycle rites (birth, marriage, death), annual and occasional ceremonies (fast days, thanksgiving days, election sermons, artillery sermons), and sabbath customs (the sacraments, the public confession, the audition of preaching), ritual was derived from the experience of books. The chapter demonstrates this experience by looking at moments of cross-cultural contact during Metacom’s War, where reading seeks to stabilize tradition. It studies reader annotations of devotional works as a means to understand the meditative, recursive, and extractive practices that grounded and routinized lay piety. And it examines the visual iconography of illustrations within devotional manuals, illustrations that idealize and demonize kinds of identity for the proper pilgrim reader. Ritual, routine, and iconography are not typically associated with puritan worship, but with an ear and eye to reading habits, we better understand experiential religion in early New England.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Ritual
  • Edited by Kristina Bross, Washington University, St Louis, Abram Van Engen, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: A History of American Puritan Literature
  • Online publication: 24 September 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108878425.016
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Ritual
  • Edited by Kristina Bross, Washington University, St Louis, Abram Van Engen, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: A History of American Puritan Literature
  • Online publication: 24 September 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108878425.016
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Ritual
  • Edited by Kristina Bross, Washington University, St Louis, Abram Van Engen, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: A History of American Puritan Literature
  • Online publication: 24 September 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108878425.016
Available formats
×