Puritanism was an English movement which became the single most influential factor in the shaping of American culture and society, It firmly rooted in the American experience and in the emerging American mind of the eighteenth century, and from New En...
Puritanism was an English movement which became the single most influential factor in the shaping of American culture and society, It firmly rooted in the American experience and in the emerging American mind of the eighteenth century, and from New England as a center it has radiated its influence in American civilization for good or ill, that day to this: and the end is not yet. There are many intellectual historians who defined and interpreted the nature and significance from the early colonial period to the present. Someone defended and admired the Puritanism, the other one explicitly disparaged the Puritar. heritage. But in the 1930's three Havard historians, Samuel E. Morison, Kenneth B. Murduck and Perry Miller made so-called Puritan renaissance beginning the Mnrdock's Increas Mattter.
Perry Miller (1903-1963) was the greated of all historians of American Puritanism. In a number of books and articles published between the 1930's and the 1960's he explored the depths of Puritan thought and feeling. The corpus of Miller's work on Puritanism constitutes the most complete picture we have of any such complex movement in all American history. Espesially Miller elucidated the New England Puritan's non-Separatist congregationalism, the covenant theology as an interlocking system between their church state and society, and their special mission as an errand in the wilderness. And then Miller traced how that synthesis of the concepte changed in the settling of New England from 1620 to 1720.
Among his many books two volumes of The New England Mind are the best books on New England puritanism and are unsuppassed in the whole corpus of American historical scholarship. They are not only the models of whatlearned intellectual history shoul dbe, but also constituted a landmark in the western intellectual history He used the topical method and non-environmental technique alloting not any concern to the solo-economic milieu in most his writings.
So Miller was criticized that he was too provincial, monolithic and over-intellectualized the American puritans by the historians of the pluralist or revisionist. The social historians applied an interdisciplinary approach to study Puritanism. However till now, no one can surpass Millers scholarship in American Puritanism history-graphy.