| not confined to any single line of study. To a certain extent this is also true of Perry Miller, who arrived at Harvard as a young man from Chicago determined to make the study of Puritanism his own. He succeeded in extraordinary ways and today the study of Puritanism still bears the impress he first began to make on it in 1933 with his brilliant book on church polity, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650.2 Whatever one might say about Miller's range of interests, he was primarily an intellectual historian and the books, articles, and editions of Puritan writings he produced in the twenty years following the publication of Orthodoxy in Massachusetts fall largely into the field of American intellectual history. The greatest of Miller's works appeared on either side of World War II under the general title The New England Mind.3 |
| In defining the field, Miller gave Puritan theology, and what happened to it in the hundred years between 1630 and 1730, a central place. In fact, he insisted that these subjects deserved attention above all others because they shaped more than anything else what would now be called Puritan culture. He was not, as his critics have claimed, indifferent to social history, but his method of extracting it from such sources as sermons and tracts left something to be desired. His method of discovering what was happening in the society of New England was to rely on indirection, on hints in sources not ordinarily the grist for the mills of social historians, and then, invariably, to point out how far actual social development deviated from the intentions of those under study. Obliqueness and irony have their uses in historical works, but they cannot provide a full or satisfactory account of society. Yet Miller's conclusions, especially as presented in The New England Mind, were not only original and exciting, they were indispensable to an understanding of the early history of New England. |
| Since Miller's death in 1963, Puritan studies have ranged widely over the literature and society of Puritan New England. Virtually all of this scholarship owes something to his inspiration. Even the studies of towns and families that began to pour out in the 1970s are in Miller's debtsome, to be sure, in a peculiar way insofar as they repudiate his method and his focus on the mind. |
| A worthy field in its own way, social history has thrown up a serious challenge to traditional conceptions of the study of New England Puritanism. The most important of these works have |
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