The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America

Bringing together an extraordinary richness of evidence -- from letters, diaries, and other intimate family writing of the 17th and 18th centuries -- Philip Greven, the distinguished scholar of colonial history, explores the strinkingly distinctive ways in which Protestant children are reared, and the Protestant temperament shaped, in America. Through this cache of remarkably immediate and moving material -- the family papers of some of America's most famous theologians, political figures, lawyers, and ministers as well as those of lesser-known contemporaries (farmers, merchants, housewives) who embodied Protestant life and wrote about it most expressively -- Philip Greven traces the hidden continuities of religious experience, of attitudes toward God, children, the will, the body, sexuality, achievement, pleasure, virtue, and selfhood among the three Protestant groups at the time. "The Protestant Temperament" uncovers the personal experience and psychological and social effects of religion and piety in the America of the 17th and 18th centuries, the feelings as well as the beliefs of religious people. -- From publisher's description.… (more)