ASH3002y Reading Assignment
February 1, 1999

Theological Givens, Social Departures in Seventeenth-century New England
or Besides Catching Fish: Keeping and Breaking Covenant in New England

Required Readings:

• John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (1630), in Norton Anthology, pp. 214-225. (Available in HTML form at the Hanover Historical Texts Project.)

• John Winthrop, July 3, 1645 entry from The Journal of John Winthrop, in Norton Anthology, pp.
  232-234.

• Photograph of the first page of Winthrop's Journal.

• Portrait of John Winthrop -- The site where I found the link to this portrait says "Painted in the 1640s. American Antiquarian Society. Reproduced from Alistair Cooke, Alistair
  Cooke's America (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1973)" (http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/amlit/17_8/f_authors17_8.htm 27 January 1999 10:30 am.)

• Moby-Dick, chapters 6-10, pages 36-58 in the 1992 Penguin edition.

This class meeting will present an overview of Puritan theology, with particular attention to Puritan
beliefs about the multiple covenants that governed their religious, political, and family lives. A
covenant is a mutual agreement and commitment requiring the consent of both parties. New
England Puritans believed that multiple covenants governed their lives: covenants between married
people, covenants between people and their elected or appointed officials, covenants of church
members, covenants between the God and the church, covenants between God and the colony as a
whole, covenants between God and biblical personages, and even covenants among the persons of
the Trinity (the Father, Christ, and the Holy Spirit). As you read these texts, pay particular attention
to the relationships among the various covenants Winthrop describes. In class, we'll talk in more
detail about these various covenants, and consider the implications of their interrelatedness.

We'll also consider the continuities and differences between Winthrop's metaphors and Melville's.  What's the relationship between the marital imagery that Winthrop uses to describe his imagined community and the marital imagery that Melville uses to describe Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg?

This will be a text-oriented day.  I'll be bringing my own literary approach to this material, but these issues are also productively approached from a range of other perspectives, including psychology, religion, economics, political science, social history, and sociology.  Please think about what various aspects of your own training might offer as we wrestle wtih these questions.