Reviews for Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change

The average rating for Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-04 00:00:00 Tiffany Scott An excellent case study, social history, and I appreciated this studying the anthropology of death and dying as an undergraduate. I remember reading this when I was working full-time as an "activity director" and full-time university classes (and full-time social life, of course - is that three lives?) and was somewhat shocked to reflect that Puritan women may have up to 10, 12, or more children, and commonly a handful of them died, and the elderly women whom I sat with and listened to their life stories, most all were Catholic second generation immigrants who worked in the Dover, NH shoe mills, but *also* had about the same ratio of (too many) of both births and deaths of children through the 1930s. Maybe more like 6-8 children, but generally with a couple dying. Imagine how long women's lives were like that, how recently we've had change, and how many women in the world still experience this. Stannard's point here was that the Puritans had reason to reckon (literally) with what death means, how to interpret it as both an abstraction but a practical reality, whether God decreed death as the ultimate publishment for what you'd done unGodly, but also with that Calvinistic believe that after death is when you'll get your "just rewards" in Heaven especially if you worked hard. Now I must read his book on Native Americans and the "American Holocaust"!

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-02 00:00:00 LEE LITTLETON This is a very uneven book. When Stannard is actually talking about seventeenth and eighteenth century New England and the conflict in Puritan orthodoxy between longing for and fear of death, he's excellent (the section on funerary carving and sculpture was particularly illuminating). But he insists on trying to make a transhistorical argument (of the "since the beginning of time" sort), and those parts of the book I found both unconvincing and off-putting: I didn't want to be convinced, because the argument seemed smug, superficial, and arrogant. And very 1977.