It may be uncomfortable, it may in many ways be condemnable, but the modern American way of death is a direct response to the ... The core of this study has been an examination of a people, the American Puritans, who resisted such ...
Author: David E. Stannard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780190281182
Category: History
Page:
View: 823
The Puritan Way of Death is more than a book about Puritans or about death. It is also about family, community, and identity in the modern world. Even before publication, eminent historians, sociologists, and religious scholars in the United States and Europea-among them, Gordon Wood, Philippe Ariès, William Clebsch, and Robert Nisbet-hailed it as a "pathbreaking, provocative, and exciting" work, a "terse, urbane, learned, clear, humane" volume.This is more than a book about Puritans or about death.
Author: David E. Stannard
Publisher:
ISBN: 0756780845
Category: Social Science
Page: 236
View: 188
This is more than a book about Puritans or about death. It is also about family, community, & identity in the modern world. The book is an intelligent & highly original study of 17th-century attitudes toward death, which were profoundly different from those in our own time. Prof. Stannard's object is not merely to understand that period but to provide a perspective on the present. He skillfully combines historical research with important hypotheses concerning social change. The book rests upon a strong command of social science literature & is written with grace & style. Illustrations. A richly diverse & highly readable book that skillfully combines historical research with important hypothesis concerning social change.ÓSex was now discussed more freely, whereas death had become taboo, dirty, hidden—pornographic. ... In his well-known work The Puritan Way of Death (1977), David Stannard addresses the unique context from which American attitudes toward ...
Author: Clifton D. Bryant
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761925149
Category: Death
Page:
View: 114
Review: "More than 100 scholars contributed to this carefully researched, well-organized, informative, and multi-disciplinary source on death studies. Volume 1, "The Presence of Death," examines the cultural, historical, and societal frameworks of death, such as the universal fear of death, spirituality and varioius religions, the legal definition of death, suicide, and capital punishment. Volume 2, "The Response to Death," covers such topics as rites and ceremonies, grief and bereavement, and legal matters after death."--"The Top 20 Reference Titles of the Year," American Libraries, May 2004.Mourning gloves and scarves were worn, funeral verses were inscribed on coffins, and elegant mourning rings were given to those who attended the funeral procession. Many Puritans collected these artifacts of death as the form of Puritan ...
Author: Kathleen Garces-Foley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317473336
Category: Business & Economics
Page: 336
View: 958
This comprehensive study of the intersection of death and religion offers a unique look at how religious people approach death in the twenty-first century. Previous scholarship has largely focused on traditional beliefs and paid little attention to how religious traditions evolve in relation to their changing social context. Employing a sociological approach, "Death and Religion in a Changing World" describes how people from a wide variety of faiths draw on and adapt traditional beliefs and practices as they deal with death in modern societies. The book includes coverage of newly emerging social and religious phenomena that are only just beginning to be analyzed by religion scholars, such as public shrines, the role of the media, spiritual bereavement groups, and the use of the Internet in death practices.Parris's work reflected the general effort of Puritan clergymen to provide a full range of pastoral services. ... David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (New York, 1977), 55-56, and 52; Peter Gregg Slater, Children in the New ...
Author: Larry Dale Gragg
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: UOM:39015019432544
Category: Biography & Autobiography
Page: 214
View: 880
A Quest for Security is the first book-length biography of Samuel Parris, the man who led the 1692 struggle against the scourge of witchcraft. While an examination of Samuel Parris's actions reveals his crucial part in the witchcraft crisis, this biography also serves as a reminder of the concern of early Americans to sustain economic independence for their families. Fully documented with endnotes and featuring a complete bibliography of primary and secondary works, this volume fills a noticeable gap in the literature on Salem witchcraft. The first chapter looks at Samuel Parris's early years. Born in London in 1653, Parris moved with his family to Barbados in the 1660s where both his uncle and father had prospered as sugar planters. Next, the book examines his stay in Boston where he met with modest success as a merchant and started a family. The book then recounts the eight years Parris spent in Salem Village as that divided community's pastor. Beginning with his call to the clergy, the book examines his life as a Puritan pastor, and then covers the conflict in his congregation. In the first year of his ministry, a faction had developed that sought to oust Parris by refusing to pay him. Next the book covers Parris's actions in the spring of 1692 which changed a seemingly ordinary case of a handful of accusations into a full-scale witchhunt. Convinced that an organized witch cult threatened his congregation, Parris sought to root out all conspirators. His leadership in the effort led to an ever increasing escalation of accusations. When the episode finally ended, family members of some of the twenty executed witches conducted a campaign that ultimately resulted in Parris's removal from the pulpit. The final chapter looks at Parris's last years, in which he moved from one small Massachusetts community to another. Parris died in obscurity in 1720. But he achieved his most important goal--that of providing material security for his children.And whereas all Christian dying demanded patient submission to God's will, the puritan way of death, which particularly encouraged the outward manifestation of individual faith, allowed women a prominent role in the drama of their own ...
Author: Christopher Durston
Publisher: Macmillan International Higher Education
ISBN: 9781349244379
Category: Evangelicalism
Page: 340
View: 812
The Culture of English Puritanism is a major contribution to the debate on the nature and extent of early modern Puritanism. In their introduction the editors provide an up-to-date survey of the long-standing debate on Puritanism, before proceeding to outline their own definition of the movement. They argue that Puritanism should be defined as a unique and vibrant religious culture, which was grounded in a distinctive psychological outlook and which manifested itself in a set of highly characteristic religious practices. In the subsequent essays, a distinguished group of contributors consider in detail some of the most important aspects of this culture, in particular sermon-gadding, collective fasting, strict observance of Sunday, iconoclasm, and puritan attempts to reform alternative popular culture of their ungodly neighbours. Other contributions chart the channels through which puritan culture was sustained in the 80-year period proceding the English Civil War, the failure of attempts by the puritan government of Interregnum England to impose this puritan culture on the English people, the subsequent emergence of Dissent after 1600.But among the people of the Bay Colony, the Puritan idea of veneration and the Calvinist image of the “elder-saint” gave it a special form and meaning. ce, Massachusetts Death Ways: The Puritan Idea of Instrumental Fatalism Ideas of old ...
Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199742530
Category: History
Page: 972
View: 908
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode ... 5 and 6; David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York, 1977), 109–22.
Author: Erik R. Seeman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812251531
Category: History
Page: 344
View: 761
In late medieval Catholicism, mourners employed an array of practices to maintain connection with the deceased—most crucially, the belief in purgatory, a middle place between heaven and hell where souls could be helped by the actions of the living. In the early sixteenth century, the Reformation abolished purgatory, as its leaders did not want attention to the dead diminishing people's devotion to God. But while the Reformation was supposed to end communication between the living and dead, it turns out the result was in fact more complicated than historians have realized. In the three centuries after the Reformation, Protestants imagined continuing relationships with the dead, and the desire for these relations came to form an important—and since neglected—aspect of Protestant belief and practice. In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders. This prodigious research reveals how sermons, elegies, and epitaphs portrayed the dead as speaking or being spoken to, how ghost stories and Gothic fiction depicted a permeable boundary between this world and the next, and how parlor songs and funeral hymns encouraged singers to imagine communication with the dead. Speaking with the Dead in Early America thus boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.Testament of Mary Dolbeare's Death by Anne Hilton, 26 June 1739, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 'Probate Records of the Province of New Hampshire ... D. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change ...
Author: Rachel Cope
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781000558845
Category: History
Page: 472
View: 370
This four-volume collection of primarily newly transcribed manuscript material brings together sources from both sides of the Atlantic and from a wide variety of regional archives. It is the first collection of its kind, allowing comparisons between the development of the family in England and America during a time of significant change. Volume 4: Managing Families, II In this final volume documents are focused on some of the more negative aspects of family life. Sections focus on authority, power and discontent; violence and conflict; and death and mourning. Topics include estate disputes, contested marriages, spousal abuse, deaths, wills and memorials.