Daniels, Puritans At Play - Leisure And Recreation In Colonial New England

Abstract

Puritans at Play will be welcome by those looking for a supplementary reading to break down the stereotypical view of the gloomy, repressed Puritans and help students see them as real people. In Puritans at Play Bruce Daniels of the University of Winnipeg develops a neglected aspect of colonial New England society-how people spent their leisure time and what they did for fun. The first section of the book poses the question directly-"Did Puritans Like Fun?" Daniels's answer is a well developed and finely nuanced yes. He begins by reviewing the literature of "modem" Puritan studies with the seminal works that began the reevaluation of Puritanism and Puritan life, Samuel Eliot Morison's Builders of the Bay Colony (1930) and Perry Miller's The New England Mind in the Seventeenth Century (1939). The limited degree to which the more balanced image of the Puritans Morison and Miller presented has replaced the joyless, prudish Puritans of earlier scholars and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in the popular imagination is testimony to the powerful appeal the image has.