Review: Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (1990)

[truepenny]

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England by David D. Hall

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So this is a book that I should have read for my dissertation but did not find until 15 years too late. It's about religion and popular culture in 17th century New England, and so was actually illuminating for one of my obsessions, the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.

Hall talks about the ways in which both ordinary people and the learned elite experienced religion in their lives. For most people, this meant most immediately the Bible (and other books: catechisms, psalters, sermons, chapbooks and "penny godlies"), so he's talking also about literacy and print culture, and about the way the Bible saturated the lives of the colonists. (In Samuel Sewell's house, they read aloud from the Bible every evening, from Genesis to Revelations, and when they got to the end, they started all over again at the beginning, and I'm sure Sewell---who was a magistrate, not a minister---was not unique in this.) He also talks about the role of organized worship and the many uses of ritual. And he discusses the controversies of the day (like Antinomianism, the Halfway Covenant, the Quakers), and does a really good job of conveying how something like baptism looked very different in the popular understanding from the way the ministers meant it to be seen. (MINISTERS: Baptism is a sacrament of admission to the church. PEOPLE: Baptism means my children won't go to hell when our shocking infant mortality rate catches them.)

This is an academic book, so the prose is not lively (I *have* read academic books with lively prose, but I can count them on the fingers of one hand), but it's very clearly written and clearly argued.



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