Heavenly Merchandize: An archeology of culture and consciousness in Puritan New England.

Abstract

Heavenly Merchandize explores the emergence of an early modern sensibility or consciousness in New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explains from the local repertories of Puritan belief and practice the way in which knowledge transformed in tandem with changing modes of social and economic organization to foster the rise of an autonomous human subject, whose identity was shaped more by the subjective impulses of desire than the objective imperatives of organic living. Weaving themes of theology, commerce, and culture, it reveals how the spiritual and market processes had each elevated the sovereignty of individual judgment in the consumption of goods and services, on one hand, and the rites and rituals of religion, on the other. Throughout, it describes the manner in which the autonomous subject emerged from the creation of cultural credit mechanisms premised on new epistemological assumptions that enabled individuals to develop their economic and spiritual potential. In so doing, it delineates the cultural and linguistic realm wherein the historically conditioned concept of agency achieved, in Puritanism, a culturally resonant domain of opportunity and action.