This volume lifts up happiness as an important theme in puritan literature, once again challenging the unforgiving stereotype of puritans as frowners sunk in dyspepsia when not roused to the persecution of others. With a strong cohort of authors from both the United Kingdom and the United States, the book contributes to the current wave of interest in emotionology in the study of religion. It also builds on previous work on the inner lives of puritans, most notably Charles Lloyd Cohen's God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (Oxford University Press, 1986), and more recently, Abram Van Engen's Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Each of the nine essays delves into the writings of one or more puritan writers, and each calls attention to puritan views of happiness as a mark of virtue. As S. Bryn Roberts observes in an essay analyzing the writings of Robert Bolton, John Norden, and Francis Rous, the word happiness came to be associated with feeling by the late sixteenth century, and more specifically with pleasure, in a shift away from its earlier association in Middle English with good fortune. Puritans contributed to this important shift in attention to feeling. And the hotter the puritan, the more delight in feelings of happiness can be found. Puritan accounts of religious experience also reveal the central role that happiness played in the distinction between law and grace so vital to puritan piety. Legalist religion brought torment or simply reflected stupidity; grace brought happiness. Happiness was grace.

As several of the essays note, puritan ideas about happiness reveal indebtedness to ancient theories of eudaimonism from Aristotle and Cicero, often received through Acquinas and scholastic theology. Even more obviously, puritan writings on happiness show familiarity with Catholic mysticism, especially that of Bernard of Clairvaux. But while puritan conceptions of happiness drew from ancient and medieval sources, as this collection of essays shows, a distinctive puritan emphasis on practical piety and communal fellowship contributed to a renaissance of happiness as a recognizable emotional state.

The qualifications and caveats that puritans called in to surround this precious discovery were formidable, and many of the authors of the essays collected here faithfully reflect the strenuous efforts of their subjects never to confuse happiness with hedonism. Delight, pleasure, and enjoyment had to come from God or they were worthless and destructive. For some puritans at least, delight, pleasure, and enjoyment also had to be about God, as if forgetting God in any moment, and failing to recognize him as the source of happiness, was a horrible act of treachery.

All of the essays in this volume adhere closely to puritan texts in their effort to prove the importance of happiness for puritans, and to reflect the concern of puritan writers that happiness should be properly understood. But one essay stands out from the rest in being more ambitious than the others in its application of theoretical work in emotionology, and for its forthright thesis that puritan piety built confidence by cultivating happiness as a form of spiritual assurance. Kate Narveson's essay, “Resting Assured in Puritan Piety: The Lay Experience,” argues that while scholars have emphasized puritan anxiety about election, feelings of assurance were common among lay puritans. Indeed, ordinary people may have been attracted to the practical piety supported by puritan fellowship because of the feelings of comfort it brought. For example, Nehemiah Wallington coped with anxiety by practicing assurance in community with others, even rising to states of exuberant confidence in his friendship with God. Richard Wills and Grace Mildmay seem not to have been troubled by anxiety at all, but lived with steady feelings of spiritual assurance as a result of their practice of piety, and their membership in an emotional community where cheerfulness reigned.

Though the authors of the essays in this volume confine themselves to analysis of religious happiness in England, New England, and the Netherlands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, historians of American religious history may be surprised to find a distant mirror of the therapeutic culture of self-help in the puritan writings examined in this book. Manifest in American Christianity today in the ministries of Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and T. D. Jakes, this therapeutic culture owes much to William James's post-puritan brief for religious experience as a means to happiness and will power. If the distinction between God and man has blurred over four centuries, the through line of desire for happiness may be important to see.

All of the essays in this volume, and Narveson's especially, merit attention not only by specialists in puritanism, but also by historians interested in puritanism's place in the history of Christianity, and its contribution to the emergence of modern humanism and psychology.