One of the defining features of colonial New England congregational churches was the requirement that applicants for full membership give a public description of their spiritual experience. Scores of these testimonies, or “conversion relations,” as they are often called, have survived from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even nineteenth centuries. Scholars from Edmund Morgan, Robert Pope and Daniel Shea to George Selement, Patricia Caldwell and Andrew Delbanco, and most recently Douglas Winiarski, have used them to argue the decline of piety in American puritan society, to point to the development of unique and artistic modes of self-disclosure in the New World, as evidence of a consensus among elite and popular minds, as expressions of post-migration doubt and anxiety, and in other ways.

While some testimonies are in their author's handwriting, the great majority of them were taken down by their ministers. This is significant, because the ministers were not only preserving these statements for their church's records; they were scientists – scientists of the soul, as Sarah Rivett shows in her fascinating study. Where the Enlightenment is all too often – and all too facilely – portrayed as the antithesis of religion, Science of the Soul connects the new empirical methods of the Enlightenment with theology and even ecclesiology. “Ministers,” Rivett asserts, “learned to study the human soul through the same methods that seventeenth-century scientists used to study nature, in an effort to complete the Reformation project” (5). Indeed, as an extension of the empirical project begun by Bacon (whose Advancement of Learning (1605) Rivett cites as a pivotal synthetic text) and other figures, the science of the soul “claimed the New England Puritan testimony of faith as the most radical experiment” (9).

According to John Calvin, the Fall bereft humankind of its original knowledge of divinity, leaving in its place a desire to know and access the spiritual essence of things. This note of epistemological optimism had in it a paradox: “desired knowledge was also forbidden knowledge” (11). Striking the proper balance in the quest for assurance for salvation was beset by doubt on one side and hypocrisy on the other, for the yearning for some certainty of salvation could result not in enlightenment but in delusion, either self-induced through “human imagination” or inspired by the Devil. Within the seventeenth-century empirical project, New England puritanism produced a unique way to reflect on doubt. Oral testimonies provided “empirical data for supernatural phenomena” (30).

The practice of testimony initiated in Boston in 1633 and codified in the Cambridge Platform of 1648 represented nothing less than a new, innovative form. Embarking on this new feature of soul science, ministers such as Thomas Shepard and Michael Wigglesworth recorded their parishioners in the act of delivering their accounts before their congregations. Rivett finds that, from the beginning, the gender of the relator was important to the way they presented their experience or spiritual self-portrait. Male testimonies were “autonomous,” while those by females, extending the findings of scholars such as Elizabeth Reis, expressed awareness of their “deceitful hearts.” Female testimony involved, therefore, a “deferral of self-discovery” (127). Within this framework, privileged knowledge was given to the elect, via grace, who were able to “see” by virtue of an inward ability. The Antinomian Controversy of the late 1630s, however, signaled differing views over how grace was to be discerned: subjectively by the self, or objectively by others.

Historians of Native religious life such as Kristina Bross have noted how missions became a defining aspect of New England Puritanism because efforts to convert the Natives justified the “errand into the wilderness” rather than any supposed intent to create a model community for Europe to emulate. Missionaries, especially John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, collected the testimonies of “Praying Indians,” which were avidly consumed back in England, as another site for collecting empirical data regarding the soul. The quest was connected to trends in linguistic theory as well. Contemporaries posited an ancient common derivation of all languages, going back to Babel, and native dialects could provide clues to that primeval tongue, as well as contribute to efforts by philosophers such as Jan Comenius and Samuel Hartlib to create a “universal language.” Ongoing conflict, along with Praying Indians' refusal to entirely accommodate their lives and spirits to English ways, curtailed these hopes. Where English were tortured by how much assurance they could claim, however, Indians were much more ready to affirm their blessed estate, a feature of their testimonies that hints at the distinctive synthesis that Native speakers could achieve, and even, Rivett suggests, anticipated spiritual autobiographies coming out of the widespread revivals of the mid-eighteenth century.

Deathbed speeches provided yet another arena for gathering evidence of the spirit, religious experience, even an afterlife. By the end of the seventeenth century, in fact, deathbed chambers, Rivett claims, replaced the meeting house as the primary laboratory for investigation, because of the unreliability of church testimonies. This may misidentify the importance of deathbed accounts, but there is no arguing that the popularity of such accounts, especially those with female subjects, rose in New England in the wake of King Philip's War and the new charter. The art of dying well, as scholars including Donald Stannard, David Hackett Fischer and Eric Seeman have reminded us, was extremely important in the early modern world as a familial and religious ritual, in which the dying person was to act as a model of submissiveness while conveying pearls of wisdom. Religious leaders saw these occasions as opportunities to collect “artifacts of the invisible world” (153) that could be used to discredit mechanistic views of reality.

Courtroom testimony also became a source for the science of the soul, particularly in the witch hunts of Essex County in the early 1690s. Ministers and judges carefully questioned the afflicted, witnesses, and accused, looking for minute details, this time not of the workings of grace, but of the wiles of the Evil One. Spectral and other questionable forms of “evidence” demonstrated to those conducting the hunts further proof of an invisible world, highlighting the irony that demonic activity provided some of the best proof for the supernatural. Versus philosophers such as Spinoza and Locke, the collected testimonies from Salem and surrounding towns could chart the unseen. However, demons and witches could supply deceptive knowledge as well as certain knowledge, and, along with increasing objections to what Salem historian Bernard Rosenthal calls the twisted “inner logic” of the trials, the assumptions and supposed findings collapsed. This “theatre of sensory encounter,” Rivett concludes, was “misapplied science” (259).

Returning to church testimonies of the early eighteenth century, we find a growing emphasis on indwelling light and dramatic, even ecstatic, “moments of experiential rupture” (279). The bounds of the traditional testimony were stretched and changed by the increasingly subjective nature of religious experience. In some ways, the period of the “Great Awakening” represented a revisiting of the Antinomian Controversy, and the two events' representative theologians, Thomas Shepard and Jonathan Edwards, struggled with the implications and outworkings of the Spirit unleashed. One interesting difference that Rivett does not take up between Shepard and Edwards is that the latter presented descriptions of evangelical faith, such as those of Abigail Hutchinson, Phoebe Bartlett, Sarah Pierpont Edwards, and David Brainerd, at second hand, repackaged, mediated through his own voice, as scholars such as Sandra Gustafson have shown, which has interesting implications for spiritual autobiography. Indeed, Edwards was colonial New England's last scientist of the soul, because even with his phenomenological idealism, his teaching of the reality and necessity of a spiritual and divine light, and his efforts to “render signs of religious affections as a public and publicly discernible phenomenon” (289), he could not make the center hold. If Edwards's Fare-well Sermon of 1750 was the paradigm's final text, his History of the Work of Redemption (1774) was the apex of Reformed optimism in its assertion of the human capacity to know the divine through Scripture, the Covenant, Creation, and time. However, that text went on to be used in ways that left behind the science of the soul as it had been known in the long century from founding to awakening.