The New England Mind

A magnificent book, the most illuminating and convincing interpretation of Puritanism that I know and a model example of intellectual historiography. Miller seems to possess a rare combination of gifts and acquired intellectual virtues--disciplined faithfulness to sources, philosophical insight and outlook, creative imagination. -- H. Richard Niebuhr The New England Mind is an authoritative description of Puritanism, the most subtle and most fully coherent intellectual system which has ever functioned as the official code of an American regional society...The book is the best single illustration of what is meant by "the history of ideas" as a method of dealing with American materials. -- Henry Nash Smith This classic work towers over the great mass of subsequent scholarship, and remains after forty years our single best work on American Puritanism... For many years to come every serious student of American Puritanism will still have to begin by reading The New England Mind. -- James Hoopes

In The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, as well as successor The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, Perry Miller asserts a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system.In The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, as well as successor The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, Perry Miller asserts a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system.