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The Science of the Soulchallenges long-standing notions of Puritan provincialism as antithetical to the Enlightenment. Sarah Rivett demonstrates that, instead, empiricism and natural philosophy combined with Puritanism to transform the scope of religious activity in colonial New England from the 1630s to the Great Awakening of the 1740s.In an unprecedented move, Puritan ministers from Thomas Shepard and John Eliot to Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards studied the human soul using the same systematic methods that philosophers applied to the study of nature. In particular, they considered the testimonies of tortured adolescent girls at the center of the Salem witch trials, Native American converts, and dying women as a source of material insight into the divine. Conversions and deathbed speeches were thus scrutinized for evidence of grace in a way that bridged the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the divine.In this way, the \"science of the soul\" was as much a part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy as it was part of post-Reformation theology. Rivett's account restores the unity of religion and science in the early modern world and highlights the role and importance of both to transatlantic circuits of knowledge formation.

Examining one of the more prolific periods of missionary linguistics in seventeenth-century North America reveals that a fragmented theological and philosophical Atlantic context caused mystical ideas about language to splinter into proto-Enlightenment notions of a separation between human words and divine knowledge. America-based missionaries John Eliot and Chrétien Le Clercq were forced to reconcile the linguistic autonomy of Wampanoag and Mi'kmaq words, respectively. Instead of advancing the propagation of the gospel, missionary linguistics revealed language to be socially and culturally contextual (rather than universal) and signs to be material (rather than metaphysical).

Christianity took root in the Americas during the early modern period when a historically unprecedented migration brought European clergy, religious seekers, and explorers to the New World. Protestant and Catholic settlers undertook the arduous journey for a variety of motivations. Some fled corrupt theocracies and sought to reclaim ancient principles and Christian ideals in a remote unsettled territory. Others intended to glorify their home nations and churches by bringing new lands and subjects under the rule of their kings. Many imagined the indigenous peoples they encountered as \"savages\" awaiting the salvific force of Christ. Whether by overtly challenging European religious authority and traditions or by adapting to unforeseen hardship and resistance, these envoys reshaped faith, liturgy, and ecclesiology and fundamentally transformed the practice and theology of Christianity. Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americasexplores the impact of colonial encounters in the Atlantic world on the history of Christianity. Essays from across disciplines examine religious history from a spatial perspective, tracing geographical movements and population dispersals as they were shaped by the millennial designs and evangelizing impulses of European empires. At the same time, religion provides a provocative lens through which to view patterns of social restriction, exclusion, and tension, as well as those of acculturation, accommodation, and resistance in a comparative colonial context. Through nuanced attention to the particularities of faith, especially Anglo-Protestant settlements in North America and the Ibero-Catholic missions in Latin America,Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americasilluminates the complexity and variety of the colonial world as it transformed a range of Christian beliefs. Contributors: Ralph Bauer, David A. Boruchoff, Matt Cohen, Sir John Elliot, Carmen Fernández-Salvador, Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Sandra M. Gustafson, David D. Hall, Stephanie Kirk, Asunción Lavrin, Sarah Rivett, Teresa Toulouse.

A survey of the journal early american literature from the mid-1980s to today reveals a curious phenomenon: religion disappears from the tables of contents during the 1990s. Beginning in 2000, religion returns with measured consistency, culminating with a special issue devoted to “methods for the study of religion” in 2010 (Stein and Murison). This resurgence of interest in religion, not only as a topic of inquiry but also as an analytic category, coincides with the “religious turn” that for the past decade has shaped literary studies and the disciplines intersecting with it. In the wake of 9/11 and the political revival of the religious right, Americanists were surprised at the intense and exceptionally religious nature of the United States. Given the religious and political inflections of the war on terror to follow, the academic study of religion could not remain the “invisible domain” that it had been in American and literary studies throughout the 1990s (Franchot). The context demanded a critical response, particularly because the largely liberal and secular academy could not understand the visible fervor of the religious right at the turn of the twenty-first century. Across disparate fields and disciplines, scholars and critics have revisited religion as a serious topic of intellectual inquiry. Over the past decade, work on religion has focused on how literary forms mediate between the human and the divine, the role of a transcendent belief system in relation to political or social formations, and the conjunction between spirit and matter, the supernatural and the natural. In reflecting on such connections between the secular and the sacred, scholars also elicited a concomitant revision of the narrative of secularization that had long impeded the study of religion by defining modernity through religion's absence, irrelevance, and inevitable replacement by competing paradigms.

From Pilpay and Aesop through La Fontaine and Orwell, the beast fable has long featured animals who moralize on the politics of the day. Beasts can be instruments of power; they can be subversive and antiestablishment. Within these fables, birds are known for talking back. We wondered what two often-maligned black birds, the raven (written by Sarah Rivett) and the bobolink (written by Chi-ming Yang), might have to say to each other about their place in American literary history. The bobolink is a small New World passerine that undertakes one of the longest seasonal migrations across northern and southern hemispheres. The raven, also a passerine, is known for its carnivorous scavenging in arctic zones. Our fable offers a birds'-eye view of the symbiotic interactions of human and other-than-human creatures across the ecologies and geographies of the Americas.

[...]early American literary studies has moved away from grand narratives of national development, separated the colonial past from the nation that has long claimed its heritage, and defined a colonial culture that is much more than just a foreshadowing of things to come. [...]our understanding of the secular on a macro level of political, social, and ontological organization remains wedded to an ostensible- or at least rhetorical-division between the religious and the secular.