1. Milton, John, Paradise Lost 8.510–20. He subsequently spoke of nature's response to the fall of the first couple, saying that “the earth felt the wound … sighing through all her works … trembling from her entrails”; 9.782f, 1000f. The greatest of Puritan poets, John Milton (1608–74) was a graduate of Christ College, Cambridge. He published Paradise Lost in 1667; an earlier discussion of love and marriage appeared in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643).Google Scholar

2. Bayly, Lewis, The Practice of Piety (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1842), 66. (Originally published sometime before 1613.) Lewis Bayly (d. 1631) had been educated Ameriat Exeter College, Oxford. As vicar of Evesham, he preached a series of sermons that grew into this famous devotional work. He later was appointed bishop of Bangor in North Wales.Google Scholar

3. Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon, 1939), 3–34.Google Scholar

4. Margaret Miles speaks of the importance of delight as an organizing principle in Augustine's spirituality, emphasizing his “ordering of all the pleasures of a human life so that those associated with enjoyment of objects in the sensible world would not usurp all of a person's attention and affection,” but lead that person to the highest enjoyment of God. She observes: “The Confessions is, among other things, a narrative deconstruction of what is ordinarily thought of as pleasurable, and a reconstruction of ‘true’ pleasure.” Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 37, 20.Google Scholar

5. In De doctrina Christiana 1.3–5, Augustine distinguished between an ordered and unordered desire, reflecting on those things which can be used (uti) in leading one to blessedness and that which can be enjoyed (frui), in other words, the Holy Trinity, the only proper object of one's deepest desire. See Harrison, Carol, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 130–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Bayly, , The Practice of Piety, 66.Google Scholar

7. Wilhelm Niesel argues that the spiritual center of Calvinism has to be found, not in predestination or the eternal decrees, but in mystical union with Christ. See his Reformed Symbolics (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 182.Google Scholar

8. William Shurr characterizes the heritage of Puritan Calvinism, in its impact on the American literary imagination, as an “infinite monstrousness that haunts the American mind.” Shurr, William, Rappaccini's Children: American Writers in a Calvinist World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981).Google Scholar

9. Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, ed. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1936), 2/1: 650–51.Google Scholar

10. William, and Haller, Malleville, “The Puritan Art of Love,” Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941–1942): 235–72;Google ScholarLeites, Edmund, “The Duty to Desire: Love, Friendship and Sexuality in Some Puritan Theories of Marriage,” Comparative Civilizations Review 3 (1979): 40–82;Google Scholarand Doriani, Daniel, “The Puritans, Sex, and Pleasure,” Westminster Theological Journal 53 (1991): 125–43.Google Scholar

11. Fletcher, Anthony, “The Protestant Idea of Marriage in Early Modern England,” in Fletcher, Anthony and Roberts, Peter, eds, Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honor of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 161–81;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand Beougher, Tim, “The Puritan View of marriage: The Nature of the Husband-Wife Relationship in Puritan England as Taught and Experienced by a Representative Puritan Pastor, Richard Baxter,” Trinity Journal 10, n.s. (1989): 131–57.Google Scholar

12. Amanda Porterfield has explored this topic in her chapter on “Bridal Passion and New England Puritanism” in Feminine Spirituality in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 19–50,Google Scholarand subsequently in her book Female Piety in Puritan New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google ScholarSee also Winship, Michael P., “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh! Marital Imagery in Massachusetts Preaching, 1630–1730,” Early American Literature 27 (1992): 170–84.Google Scholar

13. The impact of Calvinism on seventeenth-century English thought ought by now to be generally recognized. Nicholas Tyacke has argued persuasively that “the characteristic theology of English Protestant sainthood was Calvinism.” See Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 1.Google Scholar In the early Stuart church most clergymen and a majority of the more educated laity were Calvinist in sympathy, as seen in the theses presented to divinity faculties at Oxford and Cambridge and in the printed publications of the period. See Fincham, Kenneth, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (London: Macmillan, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Watson, Thomas, A Body of Divinity, Contained in Sermons upon the Assembly's Catechism (1692), ed. Rogers, George (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1898), 17.Google Scholar

15. For a reflection on “desiring God” as a theological theme in cross-cultural perspective see Delattre's, Roland article “Desire,” in Eliade, Mircea, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987), 3: 307–14.Google Scholar

16. Spousal imagery appeared in all four types of Puritan piety, as Jerald C. Brauer has defined them. Nomistic, evangelical, rationalist, and mystical strains of Puritan spirituality, he argued, can be identified in Thomas Cartwright, Richard Sibbes, John Milton, and Francis Rous respectively. See “Types of Puritan Piety,” Church History 56 (1987): 38–58.Google Scholar

17. Sir Francis Rous (1579–1659) was a Member of Parliament and Puritan divine educated at Pembroke College, Oxford. As a Presbyterian, he participated in the Westminster Assembly, but in 1649 he went over to the Independents. His works include The Art of Happiness (1619), Academia Coelestis: The Heavenly University: or, The Highest School Where Alone is that Highest Teaching, the Teaching of the Heart (1639), and an edition of the Psalms in English meter.Google Scholar

18. Rous, Francis, The Mystical Marriage, or Experimental Discoveries of the heavenly Marriage between a Soul and her Savior (London: R. W., 1656), published in his Treaties and Meditations (London: Robert White, 1657), 683.Google ScholarHis finest Augustinian prose is found at the end of The Mystical Marriage, where he prays: “Come therefore into me, O thou that art love, and love thy self in me! Come into me, and by thy own most excellent love, fitly love thy own most excellent loveliness. And while thou lovest thy self in my soul, let my soul according to her measure, taste and see, and love that love.” Mystical Marriage, 736.Google Scholar

19. On the history of desire in medieval Christian spirituality, see Matter, E. Ann, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990);CrossRefGoogle Scholarand Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).Google Scholar

20. Rous, , Mystical Marriage, 687.Google Scholar

21. See Leclercq, Jean, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Misrahi, Catharine (New York: New American Library, 1961).Google Scholar For a discussion of desire and the “pleasure of the word” in Calvin see Engammare, Max, “Plaisir des mets, plaisirs des mots: Irdische Freude bei Calvin” in Neuser, Wilhelm H. and Armstrong, Brian G., eds., Calvinus sincerioris religionis vindex: Calvin as Protector of the Purer Religion, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 26 (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1997), 189–208.Google Scholar

22. Miles, Margaret, “On Reading Augustine and on Augustine's Reading,” The Christian Century, 05 21–28, 1997, 511.Google Scholar

23. Augustine, De Musica 6.11.29; quoted in Miles, Desire and Delight, 100.Google Scholar

24. Augustine, , Confessions 10.8, trans. Boulding, Maria (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 202.Google Scholar

25. It is curious, as Margaret Miles observes, that Augustine—when he describes leaving the unnamed woman with whom he had lived for thirteen years, taking their son with him—says nothing of the relationship they had shared together. Instead, he simply grieves over his own sexual incontinence, inviting readers to identify with his pain (without even thinking of hers). See Confessions 6.15, and Miles, Desire and Delight, 78.Google Scholar

26. Confessions 10.9; quoted in Miles, Desire and Delight, 56.Google Scholar

27. Emmanuel, , Pembroke, Christ's, and St. John's Colleges at Cambridge were particularly known as hotbeds of Puritanism in this period, training such prominent English divines as Thomas Cartwright, William Perkins, William Ames, and John Milton, as well as American Puritans like John Cotton and John Winthrop.Google Scholar

28. Quoted in Bouwsma, William J., “The Spirituality of John Calvin”, in Raitt, Jill, ed., Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 320–24.Google Scholar

29. See, for example, John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.3.1; 4.17.9,12 (for an edition in English see Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. Battles, Ford Lewis, ed. McNeill, John T., Library of Christian Classics 20–21 [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960]).Google Scholar A study of Calvin's use of the words for “enjoying” (fruor) and “taking delight” (delecto) suggests an interesting appropriation of Augustinian language. See Wevers, Richard F., Concordance to Calvin's Institutio, 1559 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Digamma Publishers, 1992).Google ScholarInstitutes 3.10.2, with its stunning celebration of natural beauty, is especially suggestive in its contrast of frui and uti, the enjoyment of creation's loveliness as contrasted with its necessary use.Google Scholar

30. Winship, Michael, “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh!” 175.Google Scholar

31. Calvin held rhetoric in high esteem, defending the use of figurative language as “the only answer becoming to a theologian: that although a figurative expression is less precise, it expresses with greater significance and elegance what, said simply and without figure, would have less force and address. Hence figures are called the eyes of speech, not because they explain the matter more easily than simple ordinary language, but because they win attention by their propriety and arouse the mind by their luster, and by their lively similitude so represent what is said that it enters more effectively into the heart.” The Clear Explanation of Sound Doctrine concerning the True Partaking of the Flesh and Blood of Christ in the Holy Supper (1561), in Calvin: Theological Treatises, trans. Reid, J. K. S. (London: SCM, 1954), 319.Google Scholar

32. Winship, Michael, “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh!” 176.Google Scholar

33. Puritan marriage manuals regularly spoke of the importance of choosing one's love and then loving one's choice. While they knew that desire initially draws lovers to each other, they expected covenant faithfulness subsequently to release a still greater affective response. See William and Malleville Haller, “The Puritan Art of Love,” 262.Google Scholar

34. Sibbes, Richard, “The Spouse, Her Earnest Desire After Christ,” published in Two Sermons (London: T. Cotes, 1638),Google Scholarreprinted in The Works of Richard Sibbes, 2: 203–1 Richard Sibbes (1577–1635) was a graduate of St. John's, Cambridge, later becoming a lecturer at Holy Trinity, Cambridge. Sibbes was a friend of Archbishop James Usher, and his book The Bruised Reede and Smoaking Flax (1630) exercised a profound influence on Richard Baxter.Google Scholar

35. Owen, John, “Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, each Person Distinctly, in Love, Grace, and Consolation” (1657), in The Works of John Owen, ed. Goold, William H. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 2: 122–23.Google ScholarOwen, John (1616–83) had been educated at Queen's College, Oxford, and in 1652 was appointed vice-chancellor of Oxford University. He was offered the presidency of Harvard University, but declined. Owen's strict yet creative Calvinist theology is apparent in such works as The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (London, 1648).Google Scholar

36. Luis, Juan (Johannes Ludovicus) Vives, The Instruction of a Christian Woman (London, 1557), D4. Juan Vives (1492–1540) was a Spanish Catholic humanist praised by Erasmus for his commentary on Augustine's City of God. He was made a fellow of Corpus Christi College at Oxford, lecturing there in the 1520s.Google Scholar

37. In his Summa theologica, part 3 (supplement), qu. 41, art. 4 (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province [New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948]), Thomas had stressed sexual relations as a duty alone: “For if the motive for the marriage act be a virtue, whether of justice that they may render the debt, or of religion, that they may beget children for the worship of God, it is meritorious. But if the motive be lust … it is a venial sin.”Google Scholar

38. Whately, William, A Bride Bush, or a Direction for Married Persons (London, 1616), 18–20;Google Scholarand Gouge, William, Of Domestical Duties (London: J. Haviland, 1622), 221.Google Scholar For a discussion of these seventeenth-century English conduct-book writers, see Fletcher, “The Protestant Idea of Marriage,” 161–81. An anonymous Puritan writer could speak of a married couple joyfully giving “due benevolence one to the other; as two musical instruments rightly fitted do make a most pleasant and sweet harmony in a well tuned consort.” See Frye, Roland, “The Teachings of Classical Puritanism on Conjugal Love,” Studies in the Renaissance 2 (1955): 155–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Durham, James, An Exposition of the Song of Solomon (1668; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1840), 13–14. James Durham (1622–58) was one of the most highly esteemed of Scotland's seventeenth-century Puritans. Educated at St. Andrews, he served as a captain in the Scottish army in the English Civil War and was later appointed Professor of Divinity at Glasgow University. He was best known for his “Key to the Canticles,” a volume of 460 pages.Google Scholar

40. See Praz, Mario, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome: Edizioni Di Storia E Litteratura, 1964), 145.Google Scholar

41. Calvin had argued that God “will not have us abuse the beasts beyond measure, but to nourish them and to have care of them.… If a man spare neither his horse nor his ox nor his ass, therein he betrayeth the wickedness of his nature. And if he say, ‘Tush, I care not, for it is but a brute beast,’ I answer again, ‘Yea, but it is a creature of God.’” Calvin's, Sermons on Deuteronomy, quoted in Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 154.Google Scholar

42. In James Ussher's analysis of the fourth commandment, he asked, “Why is there mention of allowing rest to the beasts?” His answer: “First, that we may shew mercy, even to the beast. Prov. 12:10. Secondly, to represent after a sort of everlasting Sabbath, wherin all creatures shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption. Rom. 8:20, 21.” A Body of Divinitie, or the Summe and Substance of Christian Religion (London: Thomas Downes and Geo. Badger, 1653), 248.Google Scholar

43. See Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World, 154–66.Google Scholar

44. “It is significant,” writes James Deotis Roberts, “that the great reaction against the dogmatism and intolerance of Puritanism came from within their own ranks and mainly from men trained at Emmanuel, the Puritan College. Thus, the law of reaction was at work, ‘for the stringency of Puritan and Calvinistic rule tended to create its own exception,’ and to drive men of ‘independent and antipathetic temper’ to revolt. This ‘citadel of Puritanism and Calvinism became … the cradle of a movement animated by the spirit of Plato and devoted to the golden mean in every sphere of thought and life.’ ” Front Puritanism to Platonism in Seventeenth-Century England (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 44.Google ScholarThe quotation in Roberts is from Powicke, Frederick J., The Cambridge Platonists (Hildesheim, N.Y.: G. Olms, 1970), 3.Google Scholar

45. Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83) was himself a graduate of Emmanuel College, later serving as provost of King's College, Cambridge. Other Cambridge Platonists included prominent figures like Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, and John Smith, all of Puritan background. See Howe, Daniel W., “The Cambridge Platonists of Old England and the Cambridge Platonists of New England,” Church History 57 (1988): 470–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. The Works of the Learned Benjamin Whichcote (Aberdeen: J. Chalmers, 1751), 3: 176, 190.Google Scholar

47. See Raven, Charles E., Natural Religion and Christian Theology, Gifford Lectures, 1951, ser. 1, Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 109.Google Scholar

48. Baxter, Richard, The Saints' Everlasting Rest (London: Epworth, 1962), 143. Baxter went on to declare, “He is the best scholar who hath the readiest passage from the ear to the brain, but he is the best Christian who hath the readiest passage from the brain to the heart” (153). Richard Baxter (1615–91) was pastor of the church at Kidderminster near Birmingham and a moderate noncomformist who sought unity among Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Independents.Google Scholar

49. Baxter, , Everlasting Rest, 42.Google Scholar

50. Baxter, , Everlasting Rest, 40. “Knowledge of itself is very desirable,” he added, meaning that its energy and authenticity springs from the affections.Google Scholar

51. Baxter, , Everlasting Rest, 167–68.Google Scholar

52. Baxter, , The Christian Directory, published in The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter (London: James Duncan, 1830), 353.Google Scholar

53. Sibbes, Richard, “Balaam's Wish” (London: E. Purslow, 1639),Google Scholarreprinted in Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Grosart, Alexander B. (Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth Trust, 1983), 7: 11–12.Google ScholarSibbes would add in his Divine Meditations and Holy Contemplations (London: Simon Miller, 1658): “Desires shew the frame of the soul more than anything: as where there is a spring, it discovers itself by vapours that arise; so the breathing of these desires shew that there is a spring of grace in the heart.”Google ScholarWorks of Richard Sibbes, 7: 187.Google Scholar

54. Cotton, John, A Brief Exposition with Practical Observations upon the Whole Book of Canticles (London: T. R. and E. M, 1655), 3. John Cotton (1584–1652) was another Puritan divine from Trinity College, Cambridge, who served as minister in Boston, England, before immigrating to Boston, Massachusetts in 1633.Google Scholar

55. Bailey, John, Man's Chief End to Glorifie God; or Some Brief Sermon-notes on 1 Cor. 10:21 (Boston: Samuel Green, 1689), 148.Google ScholarJohn Bailey (1643–97) was from Blackburn, Lancashire, where he had been ordained a Congregationalist minister in 1670. Subsequently imprisoned for his nonconformity, he moved to Ireland and then on to New England in 1683, serving churches in Boston and Watertown.Google Scholar

56. “Take no nay of him, till he hath given thee the kisses of his love,” he instructed; see Sibbes, “The Spouse, Her Earnest Desire after Christ her Husband,” 206.Google Scholar

57. Sibbes, Richard, A Breathing After God, or A Christians Desire of Gods Presence (London: John Dawson, 1639), reprinted in Works of Richard Sibbes, 2: 233.Google Scholar

58. Rous, Francis, “The Art of Happiness,” published in Treatises and Meditations, 91.Google Scholar

59. James Turner Johnson discusses “The Covenant Idea and the Puritan Doctrine of Marriage” in the first chapter of his A Society Ordained by God: English Puritan Marriage Doctrine in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970), 19–49.Google Scholar

60. Referring to Hosea 2:21, Caryl spoke of God as having “betrothed himself in mercies and loving kindness” to all the creatures of earth;Google ScholarCaryl, Joseph, An Exposition with Practical Observations: Continued upon the Eleventh, Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Chapters of the Book of Job (London: J. Macock, 1652), 207. Joseph Caryl (1602–73) was minister at the church of St. Magnus near London Bridge and a member of the Westminster Assembly. His exposition of Job was one of the great Puritan commentaries.Google Scholar

61. Crofts, Robert, The Lover, or Nuptiall Love (London, 1638);Google ScholarAllin, John, The Spouse of Christ Coming out of Affliction, leaning upon Her Beloved (Cambridge: Samuel Green, 1672);Google ScholarSibbes, Richard, The Bride's Longing for her Bridegroom's Second Coming (1638);Google ScholarFlavell, John, Husbandry Spiritualized: Or, the Heavenly Use of Earthly Things (London: Robert Boulter, 1669);Google ScholarAusten, Ralph, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (Oxford: L. Lichfield, 1653);Google Scholarand Taylor, Thomas, Meditations from the Creatures (London: J. Bartlet, 1635).Google Scholar

62. Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).Google Scholar

63. Kolodny, Annette, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).Google ScholarSee also her book, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).Google Scholar

64. Morton, Thomas, New English Canaan (London: Charles Green, 1632), published in Tracts and Other Papers, ed. Force, Peter (Washington: P. Force, 1836–1846), 2: 10. Morton was not a Puritan. Indeed, his work heaped ridicule on the New England colonists.Google Scholar

65. Cecelia Tichi shows, for example, how early New England Puritans justified their “right” to the land around Massachusetts Bay because of their ability to “use” it well, making a visible impress on the natural landscape. The Puritan “legitimates his claim to America by manifestly improving it.” Hence, John Winthrop could say: “we deny that the Indians heere can have any title to more lands then they can improve.… God gave the earth to be subdued, ergo a man can have no more land than he can subdue.” See Tichi, , New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 9–10.Google Scholar

66. Bailey, John, Man's Chief End to Glorifie God, 9–10.Google Scholar

67. Flavell, John, Husbandry Spiritualized, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 3. John Flavell (1630–91) was a Presbyterian divine trained at University College, Oxford who was ejected from his Dartmouth pulpit by the Act of Uniformity. He wrote a companion volume to this work entitled Navigation Spiritualized (1671), based in part on his own experiences at sea.Google Scholar

68. Flavell, , Husbandry Spiritualized, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 1.Google Scholar

69. Marital and horticultural images were regularly combined in Puritan spiritual writing, especially in connection with the rhetoric of the garden in the Song of Songs. Edward Taylor spoke of

Christ's Curious Garden fenced in

With Solid Walls of Discipline

Well wed, and watered, and made full trim.

In language such as this the “wedding of the land” became intimately joined to the physical and spiritual union of husbands and wives. See Taylor's, poem, “The Soule Seeking Church-Fellowship,” from Gods Determinations, in The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Stanford, Donald S. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 454.Google Scholar

70. Hooker, Thomas, The Application of Redemption (London: P. Cole, 1659), 137.Google ScholarSee Morgan, Edmund S., The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 61–62.Google ScholarThomas Hooker (1586–1647) had been educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He emigrated to Boston in 1633, thereafter moving to the Connecticut valley where Hartford was founded in 1636. His Survey of the Sum of Church Discipline (1648) helped to define the character of American Congregationalism.Google Scholar

71. Porterfield, , Feminine Spirituality, 49. Cf. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family, 29–64.Google Scholar

72. Unfortunately, English and American expressions of Puritanism are seldom considered together. This essay is an effort to show how the common theme of desire persists in similar ways on both sides of the Atlantic. For studies of Puritan religious poetry, see Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979);Google Scholarand Martz, Louis L., The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

73. Baxter, , The Christian Directory, 2:377. Cf. his evocation of the delights of nature in The Saints' Everlasting Rest, 168 ff.Google Scholar

74. Baxter, , The Christian Directory, 353–54.Google Scholar

75. Baxter's own teaching on marriage went beyond the traditional order given for reasons of marriage, which included procreation, avoidance of lust, and companionship (if listed at all). He instead gave prominence to the last, urging primacy of mutual help over procreation. See Johnson, James T., “English Puritan Thought on the Ends of Marriage,” Church History 38 (1969): 434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

76. See Taylor's, poem “Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry: Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, ed. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 133. Edward Taylor (1644?–1729) was an English-born minister and physician who lived in Boston and later Westfield, Massachusetts. His poetry, much of it written as communion meditations, shows the sensual imagery and deep devotion characteristic of the best of Puritan spirituality.Google Scholar

77. Austen, Ralph, A Treatise of Fruittrees … together with The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (Oxford: L. Lichfield, 1653), 27.Google Scholar

78. Taylor, Edward, Meditation 22, First Series, on Phil. 2:9, “God Hath Highly Exalted Him,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 189.Google Scholar

79. Meditation 120, Second Series, on Song 5:14, “His Cheeks Are as a Bed of Spices,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 258.Google Scholar

80. Meditation 23, First Series, on Song 4:8, “My Spouse,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 190–91.Google Scholar

81. Elizabeth Singer (1674–1737) was already a published poet by the time she married Thomas Rowe, another poet, in 1710. They were only married a few years before his death by consumption in 1715. For the rest of her life she lived as a recluse at her family's home in the town of Frome in Somerset. The Puritan hymn writer Isaac Watts published her Devout Exercises of the Heart after her death in 1737.Google Scholar

82. Farley, Wendy, Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 69.Google Scholar

83. Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 33.Google ScholarLevinas (1906–95) was born in Lithuania, but lived most of his life in France, teaching philosophy at the University of Poitiers. He wrote his dissertation at Strasbourg on Husserl's phenomenology and was also influenced by Heidegger. His most important book, Totalité et infini, was originally published in 1961.Google Scholar

84. Levinas, , Totality and Infinity, 34.Google Scholar

85. Gregory of Nyssa had said, “This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. But one must always, by looking at what he can see, rekindle his desire to see more.” The Life of Moses 2.239, trans. Malherbe, Abraham J. and Ferguson, Everett (N.Y.: Paulist, 1978), 116.Google ScholarIn a similar way, Levinas suggests that there is a certain satisfaction, even joy, in recognizing that eros for the Other can never be satisfied. “The desire that animates it is reborn in its satisfaction, fed somehow by what is not yet, bringing us back to the virginity, forever inviolate, of the feminine.” Totality and Infinity, 258.Google Scholar

86. Rowe, Elizabeth, “CANT. Chap. V.,” in The Poetry of Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737), ed. Marshall, Madeleine F. (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellon, 1987), 205.Google Scholar

87. Rowe, Elizabeth, Devout Exercises of the Heart, ed. Watts, Isaac (Dedham: Nathaniel and Benjamin Heaton, 1796), 65.Google Scholar

88. Rowe, , Devout Exercises, 16.Google Scholar

89. Rowe, , Devout Exercises, 72, 96–97.Google Scholar

90. Rowe, , Devout Exercises, 76.Google Scholar

91. Bradstreet, Anne, “Another (Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment),” in The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, Jeannine (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 229.Google ScholarAnne Dudley Bradstreet (1612?–72) came to Massachusetts Bay with her new husband Simon on board the Arbella with John Winthrop in 1630. They settled eventually in Andover, where, as a writer of public and private poetic works, she was best known for her “Contemplations” and other poems.Google Scholar

92. Bradstreet, Anne, “A Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Publick Employment,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 68.Google ScholarBradstreet's marriage poems to her husband were emblematic of her relationship to Christ her bridegroom, as Kimberly Cole Winebrenner argues in “Bradstreet's Emblematic Marriage,” Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 4 (1993): 45–70.Google Scholar

93. On Puritan psychology and the dynamics of spiritual growth, see Cohen, Charles Lloyd, God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);Google ScholarLeverenz, David, The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980);Google Scholarand Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

94. Winship, Michael, “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh!” 172. David Leverenz offers a psychoanalytical study of male Puritan experience in his book The Language of Puritan Feeling, 105–6. Puritan men, he says, “dreamed of being changed into women and babies and of finding in the Great Father a mothering protector.”Google Scholar

95. Shepard, Thomas, diary entry for 5 May 1641, in God's Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard's Cambridge, ed. McGiffert, Michael (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 92.Google Scholar

96. See Greven, Philip, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1977), 126;Google Scholarand Schweitzer, Ivy, The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 26. In Joseph Bean's case, the struggle to deal with his own homosexual tendencies seemed to underlay the language and imagery to which he was drawn.Google Scholar

97. Porterfield, , Feminine Spirituality, 27.Google Scholar

98. Porterfield, , Female Piety, 14.Google Scholar

99. This shift in gendered identity even played itself out in the social experience of certain Puritan men. John Milton, as a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, was known as “the Lady of Christ's” because of his elegant appearance and his sensitivities in tastes and morals. The curious phenomenon of “men becoming women” in Puritan piety poses an interesting counterpoint to the pattern more common in Christian history of “women becoming men.” The Gospel of Thomas, for instance, was an early Gnostic Christian text that spoke of women making themselves male in order to enter the kingdom of heaven (Saying 114).Google Scholar

100. Rous, , Mystical Marriage, 688, 690.Google Scholar

101. Quoted in Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana (Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1820), 1.3: 237.Google Scholar

102. Shepard, , God's Plot, 70–71.Google Scholar

103. Commenting on the breasts of the bride in Song 4:5, Cotton said: “Brests are the parts and vessels that give milk to the babes of the Church, which resemble the Ministers of this Church of the Jews.” A Brief Exposition … upon the whole Book of Canticles, 198.Google Scholar

104. Cotton, , Brief Exposition, 3–4, 83.Google Scholar

105. Meditation 23, First Series, on Song 4:8, “My Spouse,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 191.Google Scholar

106. Schweitzer, , The Work of Self-Representation, 87.Google Scholar

107. This image is from Thomas Hooker's The Soules Exaltation (London, 1638), 30–31.Google Scholar

108. Knight, Janice, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 72–87.Google Scholar

109. Caryl, An Exposition upon … the Book of Job, 206, 211. Like Augustine and Calvin before him, he emphasized the smallest animals as often the most effective teachers. See Huff's, Peter articles, “From Dragons to Worms: Animals and the Subversion of Hierarchy in Augustine's Theology,” Melita Theologica 43 (1992): 39–40;Google Scholarand “Calvin and the Beasts: Animals in John Calvin's Theological Discourse,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 42 (1999): 67–75.Google Scholar

110. Flavell, , Husbandry Spiritualized, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 2–3.Google Scholar

111. Flavell, , Husbandry Spiritualized, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 2–3.Google Scholar

112. Austen, Spirituall Use, 4. Flavell urged that “irrational and inanimate, as well as rational creatures have a Language; and though not by Articulate speech, yet in a Metaphorical sense, they preach unto man the Wisdom, Power, and Goodness of God.” Husbandry Spiritualized, “Epistle Dedicatory,”Google Scholar

113. Homes, Nathanael, The Resurrection-Revealed Raised Above Doubts and Difficulties (London: printed for the author, 1661), 244.Google ScholarQuoted in Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 127, 179.Google ScholarReflecting typically Puritan interests, Nathanael Homes (1599–1678) published a work on the singing of metrical psalms, an essay concerning the Sabbath, and a commentary on the whole Song of Songs (London, 1652) in which he wrote of the “ravishing love raptures between Christ and his church.”Google Scholar

114. As Anne Bradstreet wrote in the ninth stanza of her “Contemplations”:

I heard the merry grasshopper then sing.

The black-clad cricket bear a second part;

They kept one tune and played on the same string,

Seeming to glory in their little art.

Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise

And in their kind resound their Maker's praise,

Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher lays? (Works of Anne Bradstreet, 207).

115. Caryl, , Exposition upon … the Book of Job, 207.Google Scholar The seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholic bishop Godfrey Goodman similarly argued that animals and humans are able to provide tongues for each other in giving glory to God: “Our praise becomes theirs; and their praise becomes ours.” “There is not only a communion of saints,” he adds, “but also a communion of Creatures, which joyne together in one narurall service of God.” See Goodman, Godfrey, The Creatures Praysing God: or The Religion of Dumbe Creatures (London: Felik Kingston, 1622), 21.Google Scholar

116. This Puritan identification with creatures remained largely emblematic and anthropocentric. When Thomas Taylor urged his readers to “put thy selfe in mind to become a tree,” he meant a “tree of righteousness, the planting of the Lord.” Hence, he explained, “Thou seest the Tree stand firme upon his rootes against windes and tempests: see thou be firmely rooted on Christ, lest the blast of persecution shake thee.” Meditations from the Creatures, 93–94.Google Scholar

117. Taylor, Edward, Meditation 37, First Series, on 1 Cor. 3:23, “You are Christ's,” in Early New England Meditative Poetry, 211.Google Scholar

118. Flavell, , Husbandry Spiritualized, 12.Google Scholar

119. Thomas, , Man and the Natural World, 189.Google ScholarSpeaking of his own experience with Puritan farmers, Joseph Caryl remarked, “If at any time a beast be sick, what care is taken to recover and heal them: You will be sure they shall want nothing that is necessary for them; yea, many will chuse rather to want themselves, than suffer their Horses so to do.” Husbandry Spiritualized, 200. By contrast, Carolyn Merchant reflects also on the “colonial denigration of animals” in her book Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 62–65.Google Scholar

120. Shepard, Thomas, The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied (Charlestown, Mass.: Jonathan Mitchell, 1695), 22–25.Google ScholarEdward Pearse similarly wrote of Christ sweetly wooing sinners to himself in his sermon The Best Match: or the Souls Espousal to Christ (London: Jonathan Robinson, 1673), 134. Edward Pearse (1633–74) was a nonconformist divine and Oxford graduate who was preacher at St. Margaret's, Westminster.Google Scholar

121. Michael Winship notes that “marital imagery largely disappeared from discourse after the tarn of the eighteenth century”; “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh!” 173.Google Scholar

122. Watts, Isaac, preface to Rowe, Devout Exercises, iv.Google Scholar

123. The recent recovery of Edwards's emphasis on desire for God's beauty ranges from important scholarly studies like Delattre's, RolandBeauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholarto popular evangelical applications like John Piper's Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Sisters, Oreg.: Multnomah Books, 1996).Google ScholarFor a recent reevaluation of Edwards' thought generally, see McClymond, Michael, Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

124. Writing on subsistence farming and ecological concerns from the farm where he lives in Kentucky, Berry speaks continually of desire, covenant, the care of the earth, and the love of his wife Tanya. In his poem, “A Marriage, an Elegy,” he says:

They lived long, and were faithful

to the good in each other.

They suffered as their faith required.

Now their union is consummate

in earth, and the earth

is their communion.

The Country of Marriage (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 18.Google Scholar

125. See Calvin, John, Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, trans. Pringle, William (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1948), 4: 325.Google Scholar