The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England

Sarah Rivett's ambitious book revisits two enduring subjects: Puritan testimonies of faith and Christian Reformed science. Rivett contextualizes local and transatlantic debates involving London's Royal Society and Massachusetts's ministers and natural philosophers over the legitimacy of divine knowledge ostensibly derived from the invisible sanctum of the soul and documented by ministerial and scientific “experts” who interpreted and transcribed oral testimony. Thus, Rivett updates Max Weber and his followers. “Rather than a grand narrative of the triumph of human learning in a Protestant and then secular age,” she writes, “the science of the soul reveals the limiting factors of human knowledge, the boundaries drawn and redrawn around what humans could know and what they could not know” (p. 25). Any inventory of the canon should mention Robert K. Merton, about whom she is silent, and Charles Webster, whose Great Instauration (1975) shares themes, personnel, and locations. Aligning with Jonathan I. Israel's Radical Enlightenment (2002), Rivett proposes a “new method” to chart Atlantic pluralities “composed, not of universal laws” but “a system of knowledge ... [that] ... varies according to its spatial specificity” (p. 9n9). Ironically, the local “variant” that Jonathan Edwards “recuperate[s]” by the final chapter is “exceptionalist” America, New England's “grand narrative” (pp. 282–83, 312

Art · Colonialism · Enlightenment · Environmental ethics · Faith · Legitimacy · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Scottish Enlightenment · Soul · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies