Virginia DeJohn Anderson

Migrants and Motives: Religion and the Settlement of New England, 1630-1640

N oman, perhaps, would seem to have been an unlikelier candidate for transatlantic migration than John Bent. He had never shown any particular interest in moving; indeed, in 1638, at the age of forty-one, Bent still lived in Weyhill, Hampshire, where both he and his father before him had been born. Having prospered in the village of his birth, John Bent held enough land to distinguish himself as one of Weyhills wealthiest inhabitants. One might reasonably expect that Bents substantial economic stake, combined with his growing familial responsibilities-which by 1638 included a wife and five children-would have provided him with ample incentive to stay put. By embarking on a transatlantic voyage-moving for the first time in his life and over a vast distance-Bent would exchange an economically secure present for a highly uncertain future and venture his familys lives and fortunes no less than his own. Yet in the spring of 1638, Bent returned his Weyhill land to the lord of the manor, gathered his family and possessions, and traveled twenty-five miles to the port of Southampton. There, he and his fam-

Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England. By Abram C. Van Engen. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 312.

In Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England, Abram Van Engen offers a fresh perspective on early New England’s religious culture—no small achievement given the prodigious amount of scholarship on the subject. He does so by focusing on the Puritans’ preoccupation with sympathy, which was not an emotion typically associated with them. Challenging the view that eighteenthcentury Latitudinarians and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers were the first to emphasize humans’ natural sociability, Van Engen argues that the idea has a much longer pedigree and shaped seventeenthcentury Puritans’ understandings of their relationships with God and with each other. Puritans generally understood sympathy to mean “identification with another’s experience, often involving an imaginative transfer of oneself into the place of another,” similar to what we would call empathy (p. 15). Even when they did not use the term itself, they repeatedly invoked the concept in such alternate formations as “fellow feeling,” “love of the brethren,” and “mutual affections” (p. 15). Van Engen’s perceptive re-examination of familiar New England texts reveals that sympathy figured much more prominently in religious discourse, politics, and literary production than current scholarship would suggest. And, in what is perhaps the most provocative aspect of the book’s argument, he discerns a link between sympathetic Puritan texts and the sentimental literature of a later era. Beginning with A Model of Christian Charity, Van Engen argues that Puritans considered brotherly love to be even more essential to the preservation of Christian community than strict adherence to covenantal law. A believer’s ability to cultivate sympathy with fellow saints operated at two levels: as a likely sign of saving faith (though one could never be sure) and as a practice visible in the godly behavior, or sanctification, that testified to God’s grace. Yet even as sympathy