1In Theologies of Pain: Literary Bodies and Afflicted Forms in Puritan New England, Lucas Hardy explores how Puritan America contemplated pain and ascribed meaning to it in writing. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, American Puritans aligned their expressions of hurt with the language of Christian salvation, devising and carefully maintaining a discourse of providential pain that he describes as a “doctrine of affliction.”
2The concept of a “doctrine of affliction” originates in a set of ecclesiastical principles dating back to the Middle Ages that instructed the faithful to find divine reward in suffering—a framework already at the heart of the account of Christ’s Passion. However, Hardy shows how the idea of affliction, in Puritan society, extended ideas about providential hurt to form the basis for social cohesion. Puritan elites “encouraged the transformation of personal, subjective, and interior feelings of pain into a stable and familiar language of social belonging and colonial security.” While pain was an essential part of Reformed theology, its social significance was exemplified in New England as “private episodes of hurt were narrated in accordance with the political expectations of settlement society” (3).
3As such, affliction is truly a “literary phenomenon” in early New England, and its formulation partakes of a process of “sublimation,” which the author reads notably through the psychoanalytical work of Julia Kristeva. The idea here was to transform pain into a potent civic agent, instead of seeing it as the symptom of a “crisis of settlement” (9). Puritans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries transformed erratic natural encounters with pain into a “well-regulated language of corporate fellow feeling.” Hurt became elevated from an ordinary experience to an event worthy of spiritual contemplation and public discernment. Pain thus became the dominant civic principle organizing Puritan life (4).
4Hardy works in the wake of several historians and cultural critics of early New England (Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch), who have long noted the prominence of affliction within the Puritan archive, and who have studied the formalization of affliction into a vision of colonial community—ranging from an analysis of pain as being “mostly punitive,” to pain becoming the “seal of progress” (Hardy 5) of early Puritans, and a vector of pious citizenship. However, these readings rarely include an explanation of how the Puritans first attached themselves to the concept of affliction: they tend to overlook the links between affliction and the theme of “pain” more broadly, and omit the fact that affliction produced complicated and, at times, unsettling views on embodiment and social belonging in New England (5-6)—which is the focus of Hardy’s Theologies of Pain.
5Hardy’s aim is to look at colonial society at large to map out the ways in which “a public language of pain was devised and maintained both by religious and lay constituencies” within New England (6). He therefore regards the Puritan doctrine of affliction as a “theopolitical” construct—which also joins scientific, philosophical, and linguistic theories prevalent in early modernity. The “theopolitics of affliction” represent a “mythic space” in which “views of self and other, citizen and outcast, and saved and damned […] transmute emotion into Puritan ideology and, ultimately, public policy” (7).
6This understanding of pain runs counter to secular philosophies of the West that understand pain in an individualistic and nociceptive way—as a private experience that imperils the self and leads to one’s withdrawal from the world. Following Elaine Scarry’s ideas in The Body in Pain (1985), Hardy explains that we are accustomed to thinking of pain as something that forecloses access to language. American Puritans, on the other hand, insist that pain is “narratable, legible, and generative.” Giving form to affliction—in private accounts, sermons, jeremiads and histories—functioned as a means for “distributing and securing religious truth in stable and recognizable forms”—a “colonial truth-making” that was necessary to settlers facing new configurations of civic life around inchoate ideas of home (8).
7In his introduction, Hardy traces the genealogy of pain in the Reformed tradition, while also anchoring it in the humoral theories of early modernity, showing its links to Puritan theology. From this perspective, pain became a “spiritual barometer”: the control and balance of the passions of mind and body—a cornerstone of humoral science—was also to be found in Christ’s exemplary conduct of life, and thus became an indispensable model of embodiment for the faithful, which provided the basis for religious affiliation predicated on the capacity to regulate one’s passions.
8These latter developments enable the author to show the ambiguous stance that women occupy in the Puritan discursive economy of pain. Women were indeed circumscribed to a “distinct female humorality”: they were presumed to be inherently ill, just as they were said to have a limited capacity for reason, eloquence and wit. They were thus “less likely to provide credible, measured accounts of their encounters with pain” (14). Paradoxically, while the humoral taxonomy of sexual difference held women in a social position subordinate to men, “women in pain often became emblems of divine purpose and sources of afflicted knowledge,” as in the case of women martyrs whose sacrifice in the name of God turned feminine submission into a form of sacred power (15). Interestingly enough, the church’s relation to God is also expressed in terms of a spiritual betrothal, according to which the body of believers became “Christ’s bride.” New England women wrote with both of these perspectives, extending the discursive realm of the (female) martyred body to that of their church, thus transforming the feminized demonstrations of pain into a potent form of civic piety, representing godly strength in times of great hurt. Women were discursively situated within the space of affliction, even when they existed apart from it.
9Humoral theories of pain enabled contrasting views of embodiment that amplified otherness not only according to sex, but also according to race: participation in the doctrine of affliction was also a complicated matter for Indigenous Americans and Africans. Indeed, the American geography was assumed to have a significant impact on humoral embodiment: “with North American settlement, dark complexion quickly became a factor for describing Indigenous bodies as weak and distempered, while European bodies emerged as strong and healthy” (17). This new humoral geography reversed the earlier conceptions of blackness associated with “constancy and wisdom” toward a new prejudicial understanding. Native Americans thus became the “targets of English theopolitical force,” turning conflicts against Indigenous groups (the Pequot War, King Philip’s War) into convenient emblems of providential struggle (17). Likewise, Indigenous expressions of pain, when expressed in the Puritan archive, remain limited to metaphors of somatic violence within an atmosphere of abjection: the Puritan archive relied on the assumption that “persons of color were either not as sensible of pain as those in white society, or they were less capable of coherently expressing hurt in language” (17)—they were outside of the language economy of affliction, and thus excluded from the Puritan body politic.
10If Indigenous suffering was described as desperate (and thus unredeemable), and therefore located outside of the framework of providence, such an argument was also used to define African associations with hurt in New England. Darker in skin color than most Western Europeans, African Americans came to be classified in the Atlantic world as “metaphysically black,” thus enabling white Christians to view these populations as “inherently evil” through a biblical lens (19). If Englishness in America was to be preserved, it was thus highly reliant on the discursive extension of the human body into the body politic which stressed that “national association, rather than nature accounted for advantageous forms of English embodiment.” This supported in turn “an ideology of racial superiority among Puritans” (16-17).
11The first chapter of Theologies of Pain examines the doctrine of affliction in depth. It centers on the work of John Winthrop, whose political writings, correspondence, and journal entries illuminate affliction as the discursive bond holding the new colony together. It shows how Puritans joined social theory and political ideology through the divine pain of affliction, sublimating all instances of hurt into emblems of providence, while avoiding the sort of public failures that had characterized life in Virginia (20).
12The second chapter considers how women’s pain was appropriated and manipulated by prominent men as a source of political and ecclesiastical power. Here, Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy come into focus and Hardy shows how the Antinomian crisis was recuperated by John Winthrop, who managed to sublimate Hutchinson’s transgressions into his textual records as a source of affliction, turning her controversial proclamations into a form of societal pain. In this chapter, Hardy also shows how Captain John Underhill, infamous for his role in attacking Pequot Indians at Mystic, Connecticut, was banished from the colony for his support of Antinomians but tried to stay within the guardianship of the Bay Colony political power by sublimating the pain of two young women he rescued from captivity among the Pequots. Hardy also shows how women’s stories of pain were sublimated into the discourse of affliction by prominent Praying Indians who related their grief over deceased wives in public conversion testimonies (21).
13Even if the doctrine of affliction routinely objectified women as exemplars of pain, it also made it possible for orthodox Puritan women to express the influence that pain had on piety, a topic addressed in the third chapter, which explores the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. Here, Hardy explains how Bradstreet’s confessional style of utterance plays against early modern allegories of the body, which insulated the body from the dangers of the external world: “bodily hurt, and especially women’s hurt, had little place in the Renaissance tropology […] which pictured the body as an ideal object, already recovered from the effects of original sin” (84). Bradstreet, on the other hand, opens the poetic body to pain, thereby “breaking apart the figural constructs that had constrained the immortal soul and enabling participation in the Puritan discourse of affliction in lyrical and devotional verse forms” (21). The forms of hurt encountered in her verse “ultimately provoke the soul’s recovery from sin” (85).
14The fourth chapter, dedicated to Mary Rowlandson, explains how she elaborated on humoral healing practices in her captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, written after her release from captivity among the Algonquians. Rowlandson’s text codes Indigenous life as intrinsically painful and inevitably threatening to English sensibility and society. She amplifies various assumptions about humoral complexion and synthesizes these with observations on Indigenous cultural practice. In particular, she draws upon changing conceptions of melancholy to inscribe Native Americans as culturally pathological (22).
15In chapter 5, Hardy turns to Cotton Mather to focus on the intersection of the minister’s medical writing and his theopolitical views of language. Hardy focuses for instance on the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721, and on Mather’s knowledge of inoculation in that context. Hardy shows how Mather set out to sublimate accounts of inoculated slaves and Muslims into the discourse of Puritan providentialism, thereby Anglicizing and Christianizing both the practice and the language of inoculation (22).
16In chapter 6, the demonstration turns to Jonathan Edwards. According to Hardy, Edwards regarded affliction both as a poor measure of piety and an idea that artificially held the faithful in prolonged states of hurt centered on temporal, rather than spiritual concerns. His view of pain emphasized religious self-expression rather than conformity with corporate affect. It enabled women to speak more freely about numerous forms of hurt, promoting heightened sympathy in New England society and invalidating the doctrine of affliction promulgated by early Puritan settlers (23).
17Hardy concludes his book by focusing on prominent women in Rhode Island who collaborated with Samuel Hopkins, Edward’s protégé, during the late eighteenth century, to illuminate the incompatibility of the African slave trade with Christian doctrine, by accessing a new form of painful fellow-feeling. Hardy explains how an ability to regard the pain of enslaved Africans as a legitimate form of hurt encouraged the rise of abolitionist discourse within Protestant society. As women in New England began writing about pain outside of the vision of the church as an afflicted bride in need of God’s mercy, new ideas about pain emerged that considered it as an opportunity for broad kinship and compassion across boundaries of gender and culture. The more private and existential forms of pain experienced by women and enslaved persons invalidated and displaced the voice of providential affliction: the doctrine of affliction had reached its limits by the end of the eighteenth century (23).
18Theologies of Pain offers a new direction in the study of the intersections between religion and literature. Hardy navigates the Puritan archive through a postsecular lens that combines the perspectives of historians of Puritanism with the insights of contemporary social theorists, philosophies of sensation, and poststructuralist philosophers, semioticians and psychoanalysts, while integrating the tools and frameworks of the medical humanities.
19Hardy’s work must be understood in the light of the recent reassessments of Puritanism that have changed our understanding of colonial America. It builds on Abram Van Engen’s Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (2015) which had revealed sympathy as a potent theological and civic factor in the shaping of the Puritan communities and the early colonial culture. From Engen’s work, Hardy takes the idea of focusing on a theological affect to study its social and political effect, but Hardy chooses to highlight the ensuing logics of marginalization these communal affects can entail. Likewise, Hardy’s book builds on the new frameworks of analysis set by the work of Sarah Rivett, whose Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (2012) demonstrates that religious activities and practices in colonial New England were not antithetical to empiricism and natural philosophy, but actually built on these—that is, Puritan soteriology built as much on science as on religion, as much on the material as on the spiritual. Hardy’s epistemic genealogy of affliction in the early modern humoral sciences furthers these perspectives.
20Hardy’s focus on the importance of pain also resonates with a set of recent publications centered on the nineteenth century. One can think about Simon Strick’s American Dolorogies: Pain, Sentimentalism, Biopolitics (2014), which performs a biopolitical genealogy of pain to better understand its epistemological, affective and social realizations—a focus quite similar to Hardy’s Theologies of Pain, even though his enquiry is restricted to the forms of pain in Puritan New England and their eighteenth-century afterlives. One can also have in mind Michael Snediker’s Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (2021), which explores pain as a complex phenomenal experience, yet through the prism of queer and disability theories. More specifically, Hardy’s book echoes Cynthia Davis’s Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism (2021), and Thomas Constantinesco’s Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2022), which offers a reappraisal of the possible verbalization of pain in cultural and literary contexts which were supposedly premised on insulation from pain, or determined by its destructive aspect foreclosing its verbalization—a reappraisal of the possible expression of pain which is also at the heart of Hardy’s project. The recent special issue of American Literature (2024) by Sari Altschuler and Thomas Constantinesco—which bears the straightforward title “Pain”—also testifies to the recent and growing scholarly focus on pain in American studies. Hardy’s book opens this focus to a period which had not yet been looked at through the prism of pain, thus enriching the scholarly scope of the notion in US culture, opening it to a longer temporality, or “long age of pain,” so to speak.
21As such, Theologies of Pain stands at the crossroads of two recent developments in US literary scholarship and offers us a combination of perspectives that help us shed a new light on Puritanism and the role of pain in the development of the early American culture. One could maybe point out the fact that Hardy’s exploration of groups marginalized or excluded from the Puritan narrative of pain focuses on given social groups (women, Native Americans, African Americans) but does not open to other marginalized denominations (apart from the Antinomians) such as the Quaker communities, for instance. Still, Lucas Hardy’s compelling book deepens our understanding of the epistemology of pain in the Puritan imagination, and constitutes an important contribution to the developing body of literature regarding pain (which has shown a critical renewal since 2020), and the recent reappraisals of Puritan culture. It will be of use to both literary scholars and historians—or scholars of American studies more generally speaking—but also to readers interested in the social sciences, particularly in the fields of religious and (post)secular studies.