A Loss of Mastery

A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America by Peter Gay offers a brilliant exploration of how early New Englanders wrote their history and what that writing reveals about the Puritan mind. Drawing on figures from William Bradford and Cotton Mather to Jonathan Edwards, Gay shows how colonial historians sought to order the turbulence of settlement, theology, and politics into a providential narrative. At the heart of the book is the paradox that the Puritans, for all their obsession with recording God’s design in history, failed to develop the historical consciousness that was transforming Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Written originally as Jefferson Memorial Lectures, Gay’s study balances intellectual history with close readings of canonical Puritan texts. It traces the evolution of a historiography that began in heroic self-justification but descended into elegiac lamentations of decline. For Gay, this trajectory reveals both the grandeur and the limitations of the Puritan experiment: the effort to live within a providential frame of history that could not withstand the modernizing pressures of Enlightenment thought. A Loss of Mastery thus illuminates not only the Puritan worldview but also the larger problem of cultural adaptation in the New World.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.