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The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional
Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England
By Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe
Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, 1982. 298 pp. $28.00.

More ink has been spilled on the subject of Puritanism than perhaps any other movement in modern church history. One would certainly expect that there would come a point of diminishing returns, but it certainly has not come yet. Instead, the appearance of several provocative and important books on Puritanism in the last few years only begets more significant literature, and The Practice of Piety will certainly rank as one of the most important volumes on Puritanism to be published in the last ten years.

Hambrick-Stowe's central and stunning achievement in this book is his capacity for describing clearly and even movingly the dynamic of Puritan piety. The book arises out of two converging influences. The first is a general tendency in historical writing to move beyond the history of "elites" and intellectuals to the history of common people, describing life as it was lived "from the bottom up," rather than "from the top down," This movement toward a history of the masses has made some impact on

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the writing of religious history, both in North America and in Europe, and it is likely to continue to be a major force in contemporary historiography.

The second influence represents a reaction to the highly intellectualized portrayal of Puritanism by Perry Miller. More than twenty-five years ago, while praising Miller's brilliant scholarship, Alan Simpson remarked that Miller "has told us too much about the Puritan mind and not enough about the Puritan's feelings." Simpson suggested that when all of the highly developed theology was swept away, it was "the stretched passion" of the Puritans which made them who they were.

Others have picked up Simpson's challenge, but in Hambrick-Stowe's book the reader can glimpse the power of Puritan piety in a way that has not been readily available before. He relies heavily on Puritan sermons and diaries, but he also uses Puritan devotional manuals to describe the daily rhythm of Puritan belief and life. What emerges is a picture of the interior of the Puritans-what it meant to pray, how they prayed, what they expected of themselves and their God.

The resulting description contains some surprises. For all of the anti-Catholic animus which fueled Puritan hatred of Rome, their devotional literature drew heavily on medieval devotional materials and was virtually identical to Catholic practices of the time, with the exception of course of the sacramental dimension. When Catholics and Puritans prayed and meditated, they did so in remarkably similar ways.

For all the communal and corporate emphasis in Puritanism, Puritan piety was intensely and radically individualistic. Some interpreters have too heavily emphasized the Puritan concern for community without recognizing, as Hambrick-Stowe argues, that the heart of the Puritan community was the Puritan's own heart. This piety was also far more emotional and even ecstatic than the traditional portrayal of Puritanism has led us to believe, and Hambrick-Stowe demonstrates this by an ingenious device. Instead of reproducing the texts of diaries, sermons, or manuals in the form in which they were written, he often recasts the passage in poetic blank verse. Suddenly the power of the passage and of Puritan piety become evident.

That is only one example of why this is an unusual and an important book, a fact that was recognized by the Institute of Early American History and Culture in 1980 when it awarded Hambrick-Stowe its prestigious Jamestown Prize. It is unusual as well because Hambrick-Stowe is pastor of St. Paul's United Church of Christ in Westminster, Md., and describes the book as "the result of my dual calling as a historian and a pastor." He notes that such a dual vocation was common among the Puritans, with Cotton Mather and Thomas Prince being the best-known preacher-historians. But Hambrick-Stowe also argues, "That I write in service to both the church and the secular community is partly a reflection of my own interests. It is also indicative of the breakdown of the academic monopoly on scholarship that has prevailed

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since the late nineteenth century. As universities find they are less and less able to contain the flood of graduates from their own doctoral programs, we can look forward hopefully to a reintegration of learning with the community outside the walls of academe."

Deep within the Puritan religious consciousness was the image of the pilgrim-partly because of the ever-present images of Abraham, the people of Israel, the book of Hebrews; partly because of the influence of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; and partly because of their own experience of migration. But I suspect that the pilgrimage became the central motif for Puritan piety because it also embodied the anxiety of the Puritan in confronting the evil of this world and the hope of the Puritan in God's ultimate redemption of creation. There still remains a vibrant truth in that vision of the Christian life.

This book will be widely read and discussed by historians of American religious history, but it ought to be read as well by pastors and lay people. It will tell anyone who delves into it something about themselves and even more about the nature of the Christian life, and it does so in clear, graceful prose. And for preachers, it even has an index of biblical references, an anomaly in a history book.

John M. Mulder
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky