Whenever it seems as if Puritan studies has exhausted itself, along comes a book showing in some new way that what seventeenth-century New Englanders thought, did, and wrote still matters for our understanding of the origins of American culture and the modern world. The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England by Sarah Rivett, who teaches English at Princeton, is such a book.

Perry Miller rebooted the study of Puritanism seventy-five years ago with his description of the movement as an integration of the “Augustinian strain” of “the practice of piety” and the “instrument” and “uses of reason” in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: MacMillan, 1939). Three and four decades ago new generations of scholars focused attention on the inner workings of Puritan spirituality with close readings of journals, spiritual autobiographies, meditative poetry, and testimonies of faith. Now Rivett has taken this classic topic and scrutinized it from an entirely fresh angle—the interrelationship of Puritan “experimental religion” and “experimental” natural philosophy. Puritan analysis of individual spiritual experience coordinated with the rise of modern empirical methodology in the Scientific Revolution, embodied in the creation of the Royal Society. Just as Miller demonstrated the complexity and depth of Puritanism's intellectual system, against the prevailing stereotype of anti-intellectual moralism, Rivett shows how “linking Puritanism and empiricism . . . places the former within a historical tradition that is commensurate and contemporaneous with, rather than antithetical and prior to, the Enlightenment” (5). In their own ways, natural philosophers and Puritan theologians sought to “resolve the Calvinist dilemma of desired knowledge and fallen human intellect” (40) by investigating data gathered by self-consciously flawed human senses. Building on the work of others who have studied connections between Calvinist Christianity and Baconian science, Rivett reveals how pastors scrutinized all manner of “evidence culled from human souls” to constitute a “science of the soul” (10–11) that corresponded with the goals and methods of the new science.

Rivett explores the efforts of ministers to mine meaningful data from individual spiritual experiences in a range of circumstances, including records of those testifying to their faith as they joined congregations, Indian converts in praying towns, last words of dying believers, and the girls embroiled in the Salem Village witchcraft episode. Successive chapters offer new perspectives on these facets of early New England history, some more convincing than others. Her chapter on relations of faith, “Masculine Form and Reluctant Women in Puritan Testimony,” based heavily on records kept by Thomas Shepard, argues that Puritan conversion aimed to bring sinners into “a redeemed Adamic state” (103) and thus sidelined women who necessarily “show a reluctance . . . to claim the signs of grace . . . and to reliably witness to the evidence of their own soul” (111). This conclusion seems forced, an over-interpretation of the extant faith relations. Rivett mistakenly identifies believers as the “idealized bridegroom of Christ” in the preaching of Puritans like Shepard, a decidedly masculine image (110). But converted sinners male and female were understood to assume the female role of bride of Christ, as exemplified in the poetry of Edward Taylor with its echoes of classical Christian mystical writing. Puritan conversion theology was less of a “masculine form” than Rivett portrays it, and it is possible to read the testimony of women as not essentially different from men's, as she acknowledges in a footnote. Further, the important standard of the “judgment of charity” in church admissions practices, indicative of Puritan ambiguity, is missing from her discussion. The absence of Anne Bradstreet in this chapter is also puzzling, as her poems and autobiographical writings cast light on the practice of testimony.

Chapters on testimony in the praying towns, the luminescence of dying words, and scientific interest in spectral evidence sparkle with new ways of thinking about these topics. “The field of missionary linguistics,” notably in the work of Roger Williams and John Eliiot, “was not simply a way of facilitating conversion or augmenting civilizing practices” but was linked with the “universal language movement” of Royal Society philosophers (133) and ethnographic interest in primitive experience as a “text upon which to witness the workings of God in a distilled form” (149). Rivett coins the term “tokenography” for methods used by clergy to capture evidence of “that in-between state” of dying saints in which divine knowledge might be glimpsed (178–179), an early form of neuroscience akin to Newton's camera obscura, “thought to trace spirit impressions as they were channeled through the optic nerve and recorded in the brain” (194). Her remarkable chapter on witchcraft demonstrates how the behavior of the ministers and magistrates followed a logic similar to scientific theories like those of Robert Boyle in his 1666 The Origin of Formes and Qualities. “The testimonies of the afflicted girls provided . . . an ethnographic archive from which to probe more deeply into the world of the unseen” (256) so that, horrible as it was, the 1692 episode was not a medieval throwback or illustrative of “a schism between science and religion, or between reason and revelation” (242). The science of the soul evolved through the crucible of this and other social and political upheavals in the last decades of the century, as clergy looked for evidence of divine activity beyond the circle of believers in local congregations.

Having established the interrelationship of seventeenth-century religion and science, in her closing chapters Rivett focuses on the career of Jonathan Edwards to suggest ways this “Evangelical Enlightenment” wrought changes in the practice of “soul science.” Her conclusion that pre-Great Awakening faith testimonies became more individually self-assured through an indwelling “inner light” will have to be tested by analysis of the trove of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century faith relations among the church records currently being collected and cataloged by the Congregational Library in Boston.