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• The Puritan Ideology of Mobility: Corporatism, the Politics of Place and the Founding of New England Towns before 1650 by Scott McDermott
• Mark Valeri (bio)

Historian Scott McDermott's The Puritan Ideology of Mobility deals with several interrelated subjects: Puritan ideas of geographical mobility, to be sure, but also notions of civic and religious corporatism, distribution and use of land, and the creation of outlying towns from established towns in New England. In such a brief monograph—104 pages of text—that relies chiefly on a select group of like-minded ministers and lay leaders, McDermott can only suggest the multiple connections among such subjects. One might wish for more extensive discussion of the analytical coherence of the different issues at play. Yet this work is suggestive nonetheless, and admirably lucid prose carries many of its parts.

Moreover, running throughout the book is evidence of an important argument. It cuts across a standard dichotomy among scholars of early New England who describe Puritan social mentality as either protocapitalist or anticapitalist. That is, according to McDermott, historians have described [End Page 790] Puritan migration to New England and the subsequent settlement of new towns, one after another, as driven either by market-oriented, individualist, and economic motives, or by conservative, disciplinary, and religious agendas. The Puritan Ideology of Mobility eschews the economic and religious either/or for a more nuanced and subtle both/and. It does so with its focus on mobility—moving about within a country, migrating, creating colonial settlements—as a mindset informed by profoundly theological and practical concerns.

McDermott also incorporates a fresh account of standard economic and intellectual histories into the discussion of Puritan migration to America—namely, ways of thinking about land, enclosure, open-field agriculture, vagrancy, and distribution of land, from the 1580s through the 1630s, that were informed not by any single social ideology but by two seemingly disconnected intellectual inheritances. Puritans, McDermott contends, affirmed the corporatist, collective sense of moral economy implied in theological scholasticism (more on that in the next paragraph) and yet also embraced new, humanistic analyses that took a flexible, contextual, and practical approach to social dilemmas.

A dense preface, four chapters, a somewhat diffuse epilogue, and a remarkable seventy pages of notes and bibliography constitute McDermott's book. In the preface, McDermott insists that Puritans absorbed and conveyed scholastic traditions from medieval theology that were syllogistic, dogmatic, and conservative in social outlook. His evidence here is scattered, chiefly coming from Puritans who studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. McDermott also describes the pragmatist and morally reformist strain of humanism which inflected Puritan preaching. Although many historians have debated whether Puritans depended on scholasticism or humanism, McDermott claims that they drew from both traditions and methodologies.

In the four chapters of the book, McDermott uses chiefly the figures of Nathaniel Ward and his close associates and relatives from the Stour Valley in England, along with other Puritan pastors such as Thomas Hooker, to sustain his analysis. Ward was trained as a lawyer but represents, for McDermott, the restless mobility of the Puritan personality. He resided in Bury St. Edmonds, was educated in London, traveled through Europe, returned to London, immigrated to New England, and returned to England during the civil wars. As McDermott explains it, Ward and others in his [End Page 791] circle developed their social ideas in the context of the travails of enclosure during the first decades of the seventeenth century. (Enclosure was the practice of fencing off previously "open" lands that were actually part of large estates, thereby reducing public access to forest and field and minimizing the use of small strips of land for tenant farming.) According to McDermott, the Puritans of the Stour Valley endorsed some amount of enclosure when it benefited the local community as a whole, but they also retained many aspects of open-field agriculture, with its communal ethos and provision for the needy. McDermott maintains that such pragmatism, infused with charitable agendas, defied the stereotype—here McDermott aims his critique at economic historians...

审阅者：

• 《清教徒的流动性意识形态：社团主义、地方政治和 1650 年之前新英格兰城镇的建立》作者：斯科特·麦克德莫特 (Scott McDermott)
• 马克·瓦莱里（简介）

历史学家斯科特·麦克德莫特（Scott McDermott）的《清教徒流动性意识形态》涉及几个相互关联的主题：当然，清教徒的地理流动性思想，但也包括公民和宗教法团主义、土地分配和使用以及从新老城区创建边远城镇的概念。英国。在这样一篇简短的专着（104页文本）中，主要依赖于一群志同道合的部长和非专业领导人，麦克德莫特只能暗示这些主题之间的多重联系。人们可能希望对所涉及的不同问题的分析一致性进行更广泛的讨论。然而这部作品仍然具有启发性，其许多部分都以令人钦佩的清晰散文表达。

此外，贯穿全书的是一个重要论点的证据。它打破了新英格兰早期学者的标准二分法，他们将清教徒的社会心态描述为原始资本主义或反资本主义。也就是说，根据麦克德莫特的说法，历史学家描述了清教徒向新英格兰的移民以及随后在新城镇的定居，一个又一个，要么是受到市场导向、个人主义和经济动机的驱动，要么是受到保守的、纪律和宗教议程。清教徒的流动性意识形态避开了经济和宗教的非此即彼，而是寻求更细致和微妙的两者/和。它这样做的重点是流动性——在一个国家内移动、移民、建立殖民定居点——作为一种深刻的神学和实践关切所影响的思维方式。

麦克德莫特还在关于清教徒移居美国的讨论中融入了对标准经济和思想史的全新叙述，即从 1580 年代到 1630 年代对土地、圈地、露天农业、流浪和土地分配的思考方式，这些不是由任何单一的社会意识形态决定的，而是由两种看似互不相关的知识遗产决定的。麦克德莫特认为，清教徒肯定了神学经院哲学中隐含的社团主义、集体道德经济意识（下一段将对此进行详细介绍），同时也接受新的人文主义分析，对社会困境采取灵活、情境化和实用的方法。

麦克德莫特的书由内容丰富的序言、四章、有点分散的尾声以及引人注目的七十页注释和参考书目组成。在序言中，麦克德莫特坚持认为清教徒吸收并传承了中世纪神学的经院传统，这些传统在社会观上是三段论的、教条主义的和保守的。他在这里的证据是分散的，主要来自在剑桥伊曼纽尔学院学习的清教徒。麦克德莫特还描述了影响清教徒传教的实用主义和道德改良主义的人文主义倾向。尽管许多历史学家争论清教徒是否依赖经院主义还是人文主义，但麦克德莫特声称他们借鉴了传统和方法论。

在本书的四章中，麦克德莫特主要使用了纳撒尼尔·沃德（Nathaniel Ward）及其来自英格兰斯托尔谷（Stour Valley）的亲密伙伴和亲戚，以及托马斯·胡克（Thomas Hooker）等其他清教徒牧师的人物来支持他的分析。沃德接受过律师培训，但对麦克德莫特来说，他代表了清教徒性格的不安分流动性。他居住在伯里圣埃德蒙兹，在伦敦接受教育，游历欧洲，返回伦敦，移民到新英格兰，并在内战期间返回英格兰。正如麦克德莫特所解释的那样，沃德和他[结束第 791 页]圈子中的其他人在 17 世纪头几十年的圈地痛苦背景下发展了他们的社会思想。（圈地是将以前“开放”的土地围起来的做法，这些土地实际上是大庄园的一部分，从而减少了公众进入森林和田野的机会，并最大限度地减少了小片土地用于佃农的使用。）根据麦克德莫特的说法，清教徒斯图尔河谷支持一定程度的圈地活动，因为这对当地社区整体有利，但他们也保留了露天农业的许多方面，包括其公共精神和为贫困者提供的食物。麦克德莫特认为，这种融入慈善议程的实用主义违背了刻板印象——麦克德莫特在此将他的批评瞄准了经济历史学家……