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The Puritan Cosmopolis
The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination. Oxford Studies in American Literary History
By (author)
Nan Goodman
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Synopsis
The Puritan Cosmopolis traces a sense of kinship that emerged from within the larger realm of Puritan law and literature in late seventeenth-century New England. Nan Goodman argues that these early modern Puritans - connected to the cosmopolis in part through travel, trade, and politics - were also thinking in terms that went beyond feeling affiliated with people in remote places, or what cosmopolitan theorists call "attachment at a distance." In this way
Puritan writers and readers were not simply learning about others, but also cultivating an awareness of themselves as ethically related to people all around the world. Such thought experiments originated and advanced through the law, specifically the law of nations, a precursor to international law and an
inspiration for much of the imagination and literary expression of cosmopolitanism among the Puritans. The Puritan Cosmopolis shows that by internalizing the legal theories that pertained to the world writ large, the Puritans were able to experiment with concepts of extended obligation, re-conceptualize war, contemplate new ways of cultivating peace, and rewrite the very meaning of Puritan living. Through a detailed consideration of Puritan legal thought, Goodman provides an unexpected
link between the Puritans, Jews, and Ottomans in the early modern world and reveals how the Puritan legal and literary past relates to present concerns about globalism and cosmopolitanism. New & Used
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What Reviewers Are Saying
...with the arrival of Nan Goodman's The Puritan Cosmopolis, no scholar will be able to play the exceptionalist Puritan card without getting laughed out of the room. ... The Puritan Cosmopolis is an ambitious and successful study... Because the law of nations-the conceptual category that frames her study-is not widely known or understood in early American scholarship, Goodman develops the concept at length. * Bryce Traister, The William and Mary Quarterly * Goodman's engaging monograph is a welcome addition to the developing field of global Puritan studies... she addresses broader questions about the interaction of instrumental legal theory and more speculative, imaginative ways of denoting political belonging. * Christopher Trigg, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries of the Early Modern Era * [This book] makes for interesting reading, providing insight into some of the most interesting events in Puritan New England history. * Michael Schuldiner, University of Akron, Early American Literature * In this ambitious book, Nan Goodman offers us an outward-facing, cosmopolitan Puritanism built on the internalized idea of belonging to the entire world. It is the next chapter in a bigger, broader Puritanism. But it is also a lively essay in affiliation, community, and imagination, reorienting central dimensions of Puritan culture while inviting us to reflect on our own experiences of belonging. * Abram Van Engen, Washington University in St. Louis * Puritans, we are often told, imagined early New England as a place apart. Nan Goodman tells a different story, of a vision that balanced the Puritans' well-known exceptionalism against the cosmopolitan lessons that they learned from the law of nations. Political, moral and even religious truths, it turned out, were not the exclusive province of God's elect but were available to men and women everywhere. * Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire * Nan Goodman's wonderful The Puritan Cosmopolis adds something radically reorienting to the body of innovative scholarship that has, in recent years, brought the New England Puritans back into contact with the outside world, variously reframing them in terms of transatlantic culture, hemispheric relations, global systems, and fraught associations with their indigenous neighbors. * Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles * In this compelling re-reading of the New England Puritans, Nan Goodman brilliantly ranges across seventeenth-century conceptions of international law, relations with the Ottoman empire, and theologies of history. Highlighting literary uses of the law, she offers us an engaging argument that Puritans may yet inform Americans today about the very meaning of cosmopolitanism. * Mark Valeri, Washington University in St. Louis *