The Puritan Cosmopolis

In this compelling re-reading of the New England Puritans, Nan Goodman brilliantly ranges across seventeenth-century conceptions of international law, relations with the Ottoman empire, and theologies of history. Highlighting literary uses of the law, she offers us an engaging argument that Puritans may yet inform Americans today about the very meaning of cosmopolitanism. * Mark Valeri, Washington University in St. Louis * Nan Goodman's wonderful The Puritan Cosmopolis adds something radically reorienting to the body of innovative scholarship that has, in recent years, brought the New England Puritans back into contact with the outside world, variously reframing them in terms of transatlantic culture, hemispheric relations, global systems, and fraught associations with their indigenous neighbors. * Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles * Puritans, we are often told, imagined early New England as a place apart. Nan Goodman tells a different story, of a vision that balanced the Puritans' well-known exceptionalism against the cosmopolitan lessons that they learned from the law of nations. Political, moral and even religious truths, it turned out, were not the exclusive province of God's elect but were available to men and women everywhere. * Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire * In this ambitious book, Nan Goodman offers us an outward-facing, cosmopolitan Puritanism built on the internalized idea of belonging to the entire world. It is the next chapter in a bigger, broader Puritanism. But it is also a lively essay in affiliation, community, and imagination, reorienting central dimensions of Puritan culture while inviting us to reflect on our own experiences of belonging. * Abram Van Engen, Washington University in St. Louis *