Analysis Of The Book The Puritan Way of Death By David E. Stannard
The Puritan Way of Death has been praised by many religious scholars for its’ interesting and original way of providing insight on the way Puritans acted towards death and what caused them to act in this way in order to become what they believed as a Godly community. Stannard was able to relate Puritan events and people to the modern American culture and show connections as to how closely related each time period truly was, as well as provide insight on not only community rituals but family values as well. Stannard believed that the Puritan ideas and actions needed a new series of essays, which he referred to as a “Rank of Spotlights”, in order to help people grasp the human concern with death. Stannard’s purpose was to shine a new light on the Puritan’s past and provoke questions about these people rather than merely emit facts.
In 1971, Stannard graduated from San Francisco State University and later went to Yale in order to get an M.A. degree in history as well as a Master of Philosophy in American Studies and a Ph.D. in American Studies. He has since used these obtained skills to teach around the United States. He has also lectured in the United States, Europe and Asia. Stannard is currently working at the University of Hawaii as a professor as well as a writer. His other works range from examining murder cases to deciphering the American Holocaust which he claims to be “the largest genocide in history”. This particular book falls somewhere in between those, along with his other work involving the analysis of death, Death in America. Stannard’s thesis is that the Puritan way of death revolved around resulting to the belief of supernatural forces which lead them to do extreme things in order to get rid of all of the evil in their community. The book began with a description of the generalized Western views towards death. This section, Stannard states, “is there only to provide an outline in which the human realities of the attitude toward death are not ignored”.
By providing insight including human realities, he was able to come to the fact that the Puritans had a reality much different from that of the Western population. He began supporting his thesis with the fact that Puritans lived by the covenant of grace, “To the Puritan, a man could no more choose to be among the elect than he could choose to be human, insect or animal: such choices belonged only to God”. This covenant embodied the idea that God had an undeniable power of choosing each person’s fate and no one else has the ability to overcome God’s supernatural power. Although everyone’s fate had been decided, it was still the people's job to rid the earth of anyone who didn’t act as God intended. This belief came with that of the Devil’s presence in Puritan day to day life. The Puritans believed that Satan had infested the world with witches and demons and that it was their job to get rid of them in order to please God. Villages began accusing their own people of witchcraft in order to make sure that there were no evil people in their community, and in one town alone “2,500 people were accused of having made pacts with the Devil. All were executed”.
The desire to rid communities of all evil based on God’s wishes, resulted in the massacre of ten percent of the Puritan people. The second section of the book describes childhood as the point in time when children did not need constant attention from their parents anymore. The concept of Childhood did not emerge as a phase of life until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When Puritan children reached childhood, they were exposed to the idea of death as well as how likely it was to come upon them at any given time. Puritan parents were instilled with a fear of becoming too close to their children because if they do so, it will hurt much more when they die. They were also convinced “that parental affection would be rewarded by the death of the child before it even reached puberty”.
In order to avoid the death of their children, parents would go to the extremes of sending their children away to spend time with other families. This instilled a great fear of death in the young children as well as fear in general of being away from their parents. The Puritans also strongly believed in their “social covenant” with God and how they had to follow all of his laws: “Failure to obey on the part of any individuals within the community-even children- could result in the venting of God’s wrath on the entire community”.
In order to stop children from angering God and punishing the whole community, parents had strict behavioral codes along with the installation of the fear of death. By scaring children into acting as God pleased, parents were convinced that they were helping the community. As they began to grow up, the constant direction of everyone’s lives towards their deaths shifted their fears from “fear of separation from his parents to concern and confusion as to the nature of his spiritual fate”. God’s supernatural ability to instill this idea that he had the power to wrath an entire community resulted in parents separating themselves from their children and implanting an unnecessary fear inside them that changed the way they lived for the worse. The Puritans lives were full of uncertainty due to the beliefs of their predetermined fate. Since God had the power to decide their fate no matter how pure each person was, the Puritans were driven insane due to their lack of feeling of control. In one case, a women was so overwhelmed with the fact that she had no idea what was to happen to her after death that “one day she took her infant and threw it into a well, and then came into the house and said, now she was sure she should be damned, for she had drowned her child”.
This woman was so worried about what was going to happen to her that she decided that if she was able to kill her own child, then her fate must be damned. All she wanted was assurance of what was to happen to her and since God already knew, she had to do something to prove to herself where she would go. God’s supernatural power convinced her to kill her child because she was so afraid of her own death. Stannard then explains that Puritans were so afraid of death because they knew what to expect from it, “the natural consequence of what to them were three patently true and quite rational beliefs: that of their own utter and unalterable depravity; that of the omnipotence, justness, and inscrutability of God; and that of the unspeakable terrors of Hell”. This knowledge instilled fear amongst the Puritans, it persuaded them to do whatever necessary in order to avoid death or somehow make their spiritual fate certain. Stannard brings a close to his book with a section about the decline of the Puritanism. Due to cultural change as well as social and intellectual strain throughout the seventeenth century, Puritanism began to diminish but not without influencing America. The Great Awakening in the 1730s and 40s was a Puritan Revolution in America. This time period consisted of “a stress-creating incongruity between the ideal and the real, between traditional culture and society in a state of innovation and change”.
During the Great Awakening, death started to be looked at with a new optimism and slowly stopped being represented with images of terror. People began longing for death in order to serve God and become closer to him. As the Great Awakening came to an end, so did most of the Puritan traditional practices along with the Puritan way of death. Stannard wrote the book in a logical, organized way by dividing it into essentially seven different chapters. Each section had a specific topic and did a fine job of conveying its own message. The layout was paragraphs with the occasional excerpt of someone’s letters or pieces of writing in order to explain a concept or express how people felt about a topic. This was useful and very good at deepening the understanding of each topic. Those excerpts also added an interesting touch and change in viewpoint to the book. The book was not very long which allowed the reader to obtain all of the information without reading a lot of unneeded information. There were many photos throughout the book that did a fantastic job of depicting images of the Puritan people as well as their rituals. The images did a particularly good job of showing the detailed gravestones used by the Puritans in order to express different religious images. The Puritan Way of Death provided an in depth analysis of the Puritans loyalty toward God and his supernatural power. Stannard was able to tell the story of how the Puritans came about their rituals and how greatly they impacted the Puritan Community. He provided a way to better understand the current, past, and future problem of death through analyzing that of the Puritan experiences.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about the effects that religion can have on a community. This book was very interesting and had a lot of good detail all throughout it. Stannard did a great job of explaining how and why the Puritans acted how they did and was able to create a very insightful and informational book.
