Review: The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England
How did New England Puritans reconcile their faith with the emergence of scientific empiricism? As Sarah Rivett, a literary scholar at Princeton, tells it, they did so with relative ease. Rivett argues that both Puritans and practitioners of the new science grappled with the limitations of humankind’s perceptive faculties. By the middle of the 17th century, the “study of the soul and the study of the world” had emerged as “parallel empirical techniques.” Animated by the essential optimism of John Calvin’s Institutes, Puritan studies of the soul and scientific studies of the world eagerly sought answers for seemingly unknowable questions. Like Charles Webster, a towering figure in the history of science and medicine, Rivett clarifies the often-murky relationship between religion and science in the early modern world. Unlike Webster, Rivett closely considers the place of women and native peoples in that history, as well as the nature of the evidence that “soul” scientists examined.
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