A passing glance at the title of Douglas L. Winiarski's latest book suggests that this is yet another monograph working the exhausted furrows of Puritan New England first carved by Perry Miller in the early twentieth century and sustained by equally renowned scholars like Harry Stout, Edmund S. Morgan, Francis J. Bremer, and David D. Hall. Familiar episodes and figures in New England revivalism abound: The Great 1727 Earthquake, the 1735 “little awakening” in Northampton, George Whitefield's preaching tours, Charles Chauncy's anti-revivalist polemics, and the chastisement of James Davenport all receive ample attention due to their integral roles in telling the revivalist story. However, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light confounds this assumption through Winiarski's painstaking efforts to excavate popular lay responses to revivalism with the eye of an anthropologist and linguist, uncovering elements of religious thought and behavior through a masterful synthesis of social and cultural history that prioritizes marginalized and neglected voices from common folk. This book provides ample documentary evidence for the somatic religious experiences that divided ministers and their parishioners in the fractious revivalist climate that swept New England in the 1740s, throwing the “Gospel land of light” into chaos.

Darkness Falls opens with competing testimonies drawn from records of the Sturbridge, Massachusetts Congregationalist Church in 1748 to emphasize the divisiveness of lay experiences following George Whitefield's first preaching tour. Hannah Corey's auditory experiences led her out of the church where she and her husband John owned the covenant into a new separatist community, which provoked discipline from town authorities and her former church. Hannah was willing to undergo this punishment because God spoke to her and condemned her old Congregationalist church via compulsive reflection on the verses Hebrews 4:12 and 1 John 3:14. By contrast, Moses and Ruth Holbrook joined the Congregationalist establishment and offered testimonies that conformed to patterns of lay devotion and religious affiliation established between 1680 and 1740. Brought up into baptism by their godly parents, the Holbrooks understood the duties incumbent upon them and pledged to uphold high communal standards. They understood full church membership as a requisite step to starting their own family, though they expressed the customary hesitance to participate in the Lord's Supper. Winiarski wryly observes that Corey and the Holbrooks were indistinguishable in terms of socioeconomic standing and their lives up to that point, yet their religious experiences carried them down different paths when a powerful thunderstorm that struck Sturbridge during the summer of 1748 evoked divergent responses. These church relations serve as a microcosm for the sweeping transformations coursing through similar New England towns. The radicalism of Whitefieldarian revivalism, with its emphasis on the bodily presence of the indwelling Holy Spirit, continued revelation, dramatic visionary phenomena, and ecclesiastical anarchy, left New England towns like Sturbridge riven with factionalism that later nineteenth-century town histories belie through selectively interpreting these years, which “were the dark night of the collective New England soul” (19). Separatism and the actions of laymen and -women like Hannah Corey permanently altered the religious landscape of New England, joining David D. Hall's colonial “world of wonders” with Jon Butler's antebellum “spiritual hothouse” (8–9). While the overall argument that religious revivals permanently disrupted communities and churches is hardly new, Winiarski is at his best when he provides lay commentary and perspectives to uncover “lived history” and the value these men and women placed on their personal religious experiences.

Five major sections that trace New England's religious history from 1680 to the turn of the nineteenth century make up the core of the book. The first section on “godly walkers” highlights the structural changes to church practices emphasizing doctrine and beliefs. While church members expressed apprehension about consuming the Lord's Supper in a state of belief, surviving church confessions from 1680 to 1740 rarely reflected on the profound crises and anguish of earlier English puritans. While the 1727 earthquake and 1735 revivalism in Northampton pushed new members to “own the covenant,” Winiarski notes that prayer bills, healing vows, and church membership were common responses to travails and a means of achieving security, which created “a broadly inclusive, parish-based, tribal Congregational culture” in New England (115). Part Two highlights the dissemination of revivalist theology through “preaching strategies calibrated to elicit strong emotional responses” (141). The Whitefieldarian emphasis on election and conversion over other points of theology led to a profound demographic shift where young, unmarried men and women joined the church and articulated confessions that stressed inner turmoil and instantaneous conversion that was often accompanied by visual or auditory phenomena.

Part Three explores the radical somatic elements of revivalism, exemplified in “exercised bodies, biblical impulses, and revelatory visions of the Book of Life” (213). Ministers like Jonathan Edwards increasingly looked for and encouraged bodily responses as signs of the spirit, with possession by the Holy Spirit gaining in theological importance. Biblicism and the patterning of speech from the language of the King James Bible and millennial texts like Revelations 20 structured lay experiences and conversionary accounts, which provoked a clerical backlash that laity rejected as an invalidation of their personal experiences. Part Four turns to the struggle between clergy and laity, revolving around James Davenport's ministry, book-burning excesses, and chastisement. Winiarski's anthropological reading of the book titles cast into the fire suggests that the laity who supported Davenport similarly rejected latitudinarianism, preparationist theology, revivalist opponents, and traditional worship. Facing ministerial backlashes, itinerants separated and left the traditional communal bounds of the parish in favor of radical perfectionism and spiritual marriage (occasionally verging on polygamy) in the most extreme cases.

Part Five traces the growth of evangelical networks and communities and the continued fracturing of the ecclesiological landscape. In this section Winiarski observes that the deism of Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncy gained traction almost solely within elite circles. More often than not, church members and ministers in communities wracked by revivalist schisms embraced Anglicanism for its comfort and stability. Others became “Nothingarians,” in the words of Ezra Stiles, as they became exhausted by churches that resembled arenas for competition rather than places of refuge and chose to eschew them altogether (498). A conclusion tracing the religious affiliations of the Lane family in Stratham, New Hampshire demonstrates the democratic, competitive, and fractious religiosity within one family as an indication of revivalism's legacy in the early republic.

Winiarski draws on linguistic theory to demonstrate the importance of language as an indicator of experiences, suggesting that the changing religious vocabulary in the New England laity represents a newly internalized and individualistic form of somatic religious experience. In an effort to avoid misleading or anachronistic terms, he prefers the more cumbersome but sanitary term “Whitefieldarian” to “Old” or “New Lights,” though the emphasis on social breakdown and divisiveness evokes more sympathy for clergy and the Congregationalist establishment in the face of a radical assault on ministerial authority and long-standing ecclesiological practices. While Winiarski does an excellent job of tracing the dissemination of language and religious thought into the laity, it is still the thought of elites such as George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and James Davenport. Nevertheless, the intensity captured in individual admissions records, their adoption of revivalist language, and the rising defiance of the laity in response to the clerical backlash after 1743 suggests that men and women internalized meaningful religious experiences that empowered them to break with established practices and venture into uncharted spiritual territory.

A review of this length fails to do justice to the intricacies and nuances teased out of primary sources culled from over two hundred manuscript collections in sixty archives, libraries, churches, historical societies, and town offices scattered across three countries and two continents (vii). The University of North Carolina Press deserves high praise for publishing Darkness Falls with footnotes rather than the customary endnotes. Given the relative obscurity of many figures in Winiarski's book, scholars will appreciate how easily archives and sources can be located for further investigation thanks to this formatting decision. Charts and tables on church and parish demographics throughout the text are equally invaluable when paired with the appendices at the end of the book. Three appendices explain Winiarski's method for coding language and sorting the 581 relations from eight parishes utilized in Darkness Falls, a guide to locating particular church admission accounts, and full-length sample relations that demonstrate the linguistic shifts prompted by Whitefieldian revivals. Numerous images, maps, charts, and tables accompany the text and are interspersed throughout each section as appropriate instead of comprising a central insert. This is another minor formatting decision that deserves recognition.

Darkness Falls on the Land of Light assumes expert familiarity with Congregationalist theology and the major figures and details of New England's history, and its emphasis on “thick description” will prove especially daunting for undergraduate students, though subsections could be utilized for readings in advanced undergraduate courses in lieu of one of the five lengthier sections. Specialists actively researching and writing within the field will find it most useful, though in the coming years the book will certainly find its way into graduate seminars on religion in the Atlantic world, New England history, and colonial history. Reflections on familial piety and religious decision-making in the epilogue raise questions about the connections between Winiarski's period of study and the revivalism of the nineteenth century. The greater availability of documentary sources from lay perspectives in the nineteenth century invites a similar analysis following Winiarski's linguistic methodology and close reading of church admission records. Winiarski proves that there is still fertile ground for researching New England's history and provides young scholars with new avenues of inquiry in this wonderfully written and detailed book.