Anne bradstreet biography puritan family

This article is the second in a series of responses to Episode 2. For ten years I have taught an American literature to survey course, and teaching Puritan literature to undergraduates always presents a unique challenge. The archaic, dense language and religious and historical context differs vastly from ours; numerous students struggle when they first encounter it.

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While listening to the recent Genealogies of Modernity podcast, I thought of two recent student class evaluations. The first one says, "Good class! I still don't like the Puritans. D'Amico is the exception. He states that "it scrutinizes the truth of noble origin stories; it often finds that a favorable myth has been laid over a more complicated and troubling past.

The first student speaks to an ahistorical measuring of history and the people who shaped and lived in it.

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It is because I believe in this spirit of both reading historical literature and reading literature historically that my students react as they do to my pedagogy. I ask them to meet the Puritans where they are, without preconceived notions, if possible. If they do have preconceived notions which comes part and parcel from being human , I ask that they recognize their preconceived notions as an effect of living in the present and not an effect of their unmediated access to transcendent truth.

I liken Puritans landing at Massachusetts Bay and Jamestown to astronauts who land on the moon for the first time: they don't know what's going to happen to them. They are uncertain. We might have stories of their past already in our heads, but the Puritans do not know their own futures. They are living in their present moment, reading their own writing.