Early American Literature

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...