Providence lost: A study of epistemology and religious culture among New England Puritans, 1630-1730

This dissertation examines certain foundational beliefs of New England Puritanism to investigate how and to what degree they were compromised by developments in seventeenth-century natural philosophy. The influential works of David Hall, Dwight Bozeman and others have placed Puritanism concretely within categories of premodern thought, and yet they do not elaborate a model for understanding how or why these categories broke down. Puritan studies consistently identify the years 1690-1720 as the period when such change occurred, but do not explicate the reasons for this confluence of change. This dissertation responds by examining the epistemological assumptions of New England's religious culture and concludes that by the eighteenth century an epistemological shift occurred that fundamentally re-ordered modes of understanding among educated New Englanders.;The inquiry is organized in three parts. The first establishes a historiographical and theoretical orientation and argues that an understanding of Renaissance cosmology is requisite for comprehending the epistemological coherence assumed by first generation New Englanders. Part Two describes this system of belief and then analyzes how fundamentally it was used to structure New England's religious culture. The final section describes the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and how religious practitioners mobilized the meaning of 'modern' scientific ideas for use within ecclesiastical discourse. Once consecrated, these ideas provided the re-ordered assumptions, strategies, and consequences manifest in the confluence of change noted by historians.;The dissertation ends with a case study of the Regular Singing movement (1720's), a ministerial reform designed to bring standardized uniformity to congregational singing through the introduction of musical education. Ministers assumed that "scientific" singing by note--rather than providentially directed and thus idiosyncratic, individualized singing by heart--would institutionalize lost practices. That they failed to anticipate traditionalist lay opposition or to recognize how fundamentally they had abandoned founding assumptions, only underscores the drama of change that inaugurated the second century of New England Puritanism.