The American Puritan Elegy

Jeffrey Hammond’s study takes an anthropological approach to the most popular form of poetry in early New England - the funeral elegy. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to a specific process of mourning defined by Puritan views on death and grief. The elegies emerge, he argues, not as ‘poems’ to be read and appreciated in a post-Romantic sense, but as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience of loss in accordance with theological expectation. Read in the framework of their own time and place, the elegies shed new light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture. Hammond’s book reassesses a body of poems whose importance in their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours. It represents the first full-length study of its kind in English.

• First book-length study in English on a neglected body of poems • First book to take an anthropological approach to Puritan funeral elegies; provides historical, theological and cultural context • Sheds new light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism

Introduction; 1. Monuments enduring and otherwise; 2. Toward an anthropology of Puritan reading; 3. Weep for yourselves; the Puritan theology of mourning; 4. This potent fence: the holy sin of grief; 5. Lord, is it I?: Christic saints and apostolic mourners; 6. Diffusing all by pattern: the reading of saintly lives; Epilogue: aestheticizing loss.