![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strixalbaI have, in the past five years or so, turned into exactly the sort of adult who baffled me as a child: someone who acquires and reads non-fiction books for fun. This one is like, a tiny corner of an already-niche interest, but fuck it, we ball, here are my thoughts about it.
I used to work for one of the historic church museums in Boston, and part of my job involved coming up with, researching, and developing a 15-minute talk that I could give to visitors whenever there were enough of them in the church hall at the same time. I ended up giving two: one was an architectural history of the pulpit, and one was about the religious background of the church (Separatist/Congregational) and why it was founded. So, that's the specific background on why I cared enough about this to buy someone's dissertation-turned-book in the 1960s.
Every time I tried to research anything about the limits and effects of church membership in Puritan New England, I ended up just seeing references to/citations of this book, so I eventually just bought it to read because it appears to be the definitive study on the subject. It's just as thorough and detailed and absolutely boring as I hoped it would be. I cannot suggest it to anyone who doesn't have a pretty strong background knowledge of both the Protestant Reformation and early British colonization of what would become New England, because, again, it's a dissertation, it's starting pretty deep in.
My impression, based on Pope's editorializing in the book, is that his approach and conclusions were contrarian at the time of publication in 1969 ... which makes it funny reading his rebuttals of other scholars because as far as I can tell, he is now the currently-accepted canon and I've never heard of any of these other scholars cited past that date.
The main issues I had while reading this were the proliferation of names that I found hard to keep track of, and the way that the absolute minutiae were arranged. These two things go together. There would be a description for several paragraphs over the details of the Halfway Covenant acceptance/debate at one church, and then he'd move on to the town further west (etc.) and repeat the process. Because of the networks of ministers all talking to and influencing each other, sharing last names, and sometimes switching parishes, it became a little hard to keep track of who held what stance, or to distinguish between examples. I think it would be better to read it the way that I have to read books in Spanish: stop focusing on the individual words (or in this instance, towns) and focus on getting a better sense of the overall flow of the narrative / the tides of public opinion in the 1660s.
It's not a book I would recommend to anyone else, unless they were also specifically obsessed with understanding the Halfway Covenant's origins and how it intertwined with politics in Massachusetts/Connecticut/New Haven/Rhode Island. In that case, it's a great place to get some more information.
There's a weird bit of historical revisionism that happened in how I learned US history - both in public middle school and at a Catholic high school in NY - where the versions that I learned took the religious ferocity out of the Puritans, and Massachusetts in general. We learned that Puritans wanted freedom to worship the way that they wanted, but it turns out that the specifics of “the way that they wanted” is crucial to understanding … anything about them, really. One of the points that I always brought up in my Puritanism talk at my museum job was that Puritans wanted the freedom to oppress others and dictate how everyone else should live. That’s really fucking important!* We learned in school that the vote was limited to white male landowners over the age of 21, but did you know that in the Puritan colonies, civil voting was also restricted to white male members of the Congregational Church who were in good standing and had professed their conversion narrative to their congregation? One of the things that I couldn’t get a clear handle on before reading this book was whether being a “full member” of the church granted the right to vote civilly, or just in church affairs. The answer was both. The reasons for instituting a compromise about who could be considered a “full member”, and what that criteria included, were also more nuanced than I had been aware of.
All in all, a very useful read for me, specifically. More broadly, it’s also kind of interesting to see how much individual humans being individual humans affected historical changes: Pope suggests that a particular preacher might have been pro-Covenant because his preacher father was against it, and it might’ve been a way to make a name for himself, politically. Votes were decided on the presence or absence of big personalities who might’ve swayed people to their side if there hadn’t been a storm that kept them from traveling to attend a particular conference. And most importantly, it’s a reminder of how small White America was at the time. The odds that two people in the same field knew each other was just greater, even though travel and communication was more difficult than it is now, simply because there were so many fewer humans on the planet and in the colonial world! It’s so weird to think about.
---------------
*I understand why this isn’t something that textbooks might focus on, because it undermines the whole narrative that white America writes about itself going from scrappy freedom-loving underdog to The Most Country Ever, but goddammit, I hate that narrative and real life was so much more complicated than that, always.
I used to work for one of the historic church museums in Boston, and part of my job involved coming up with, researching, and developing a 15-minute talk that I could give to visitors whenever there were enough of them in the church hall at the same time. I ended up giving two: one was an architectural history of the pulpit, and one was about the religious background of the church (Separatist/Congregational) and why it was founded. So, that's the specific background on why I cared enough about this to buy someone's dissertation-turned-book in the 1960s.
Every time I tried to research anything about the limits and effects of church membership in Puritan New England, I ended up just seeing references to/citations of this book, so I eventually just bought it to read because it appears to be the definitive study on the subject. It's just as thorough and detailed and absolutely boring as I hoped it would be. I cannot suggest it to anyone who doesn't have a pretty strong background knowledge of both the Protestant Reformation and early British colonization of what would become New England, because, again, it's a dissertation, it's starting pretty deep in.
My impression, based on Pope's editorializing in the book, is that his approach and conclusions were contrarian at the time of publication in 1969 ... which makes it funny reading his rebuttals of other scholars because as far as I can tell, he is now the currently-accepted canon and I've never heard of any of these other scholars cited past that date.
The main issues I had while reading this were the proliferation of names that I found hard to keep track of, and the way that the absolute minutiae were arranged. These two things go together. There would be a description for several paragraphs over the details of the Halfway Covenant acceptance/debate at one church, and then he'd move on to the town further west (etc.) and repeat the process. Because of the networks of ministers all talking to and influencing each other, sharing last names, and sometimes switching parishes, it became a little hard to keep track of who held what stance, or to distinguish between examples. I think it would be better to read it the way that I have to read books in Spanish: stop focusing on the individual words (or in this instance, towns) and focus on getting a better sense of the overall flow of the narrative / the tides of public opinion in the 1660s.
It's not a book I would recommend to anyone else, unless they were also specifically obsessed with understanding the Halfway Covenant's origins and how it intertwined with politics in Massachusetts/Connecticut/New Haven/Rhode Island. In that case, it's a great place to get some more information.
There's a weird bit of historical revisionism that happened in how I learned US history - both in public middle school and at a Catholic high school in NY - where the versions that I learned took the religious ferocity out of the Puritans, and Massachusetts in general. We learned that Puritans wanted freedom to worship the way that they wanted, but it turns out that the specifics of “the way that they wanted” is crucial to understanding … anything about them, really. One of the points that I always brought up in my Puritanism talk at my museum job was that Puritans wanted the freedom to oppress others and dictate how everyone else should live. That’s really fucking important!* We learned in school that the vote was limited to white male landowners over the age of 21, but did you know that in the Puritan colonies, civil voting was also restricted to white male members of the Congregational Church who were in good standing and had professed their conversion narrative to their congregation? One of the things that I couldn’t get a clear handle on before reading this book was whether being a “full member” of the church granted the right to vote civilly, or just in church affairs. The answer was both. The reasons for instituting a compromise about who could be considered a “full member”, and what that criteria included, were also more nuanced than I had been aware of.
All in all, a very useful read for me, specifically. More broadly, it’s also kind of interesting to see how much individual humans being individual humans affected historical changes: Pope suggests that a particular preacher might have been pro-Covenant because his preacher father was against it, and it might’ve been a way to make a name for himself, politically. Votes were decided on the presence or absence of big personalities who might’ve swayed people to their side if there hadn’t been a storm that kept them from traveling to attend a particular conference. And most importantly, it’s a reminder of how small White America was at the time. The odds that two people in the same field knew each other was just greater, even though travel and communication was more difficult than it is now, simply because there were so many fewer humans on the planet and in the colonial world! It’s so weird to think about.
---------------
*I understand why this isn’t something that textbooks might focus on, because it undermines the whole narrative that white America writes about itself going from scrappy freedom-loving underdog to The Most Country Ever, but goddammit, I hate that narrative and real life was so much more complicated than that, always.
