The Devil's Mousetrap: Redemption and Colonial American Literature.

Linda Munk, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. xii + 144 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-19511494-9.

In his book (a revised dissertation) Tom Webster, a lecturer in British history at the University of Edinburgh, provides a detailed study of a small group of Puritan clergy during the reign of Charles I. Most of them were young; almost all had imbibed Puritanism at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the fount from which so much Puritan teaching flowed; most lived in a relatively small area, south-east England, especially East Anglia. The author is reluctant to generalize, and wise to acknowledge that his study is not a general history of Puritanism under the early Stuarts. A number of the observations and conclusions, however, may well have a larger significance.

The social cohesion of this group of like-minded ministers is emphasized throughout the book. Many of them had known each other at Cambridge. Feeling the necessity of further study and religious conversation following their graduation, a number established informal private seminaries or spent a year or two as members of them. Their devotion was manifest in periods of fasting and prayer; these again were often communal experiences. Personal piety and recognition of the role of emotion in religion were characteristic of their earlier lives, but after about 1630 they began reacting to the orders of William Laud, the high-churchman who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. His demands for the observance of ecclesiastical ceremonies met with opposition from Webster's Puritans. There were bitter conflicts in the diocese of Peterborough and the county of Essex, and many of the Puritan ministers found ways of evading the archbishop's commissioners or conforming only briefly and superficially, under pressure.

A particularly interesting section of the book considers these ministers' reaction to the prospect of moving to New England, where they might worship as they wished. Although a number of them did emigrate, some others decided to remain in England, partly because they hesitated to leave family members, friends, and other Puritan ministers who were unwilling to flee. In a few cases the ministers actually wrote out accounts of the pros and cons of moving or held gatherings in which the issue was discussed. Historians of religion in colonial America, as well as those whose interest is limited to England, will find new information and food for thought here.

The book, given its limited scope, is carefully researched, using a variety of materials. It is exceptionally well written; the author is perhaps a bit more personal than usual, explaining his approach and commenting on his sources, sometimes in the first person. This is not bothersome, but some readers will find his glib use of "godly" to identify his ministers irritating. No doubt they did think that they were godly, and called themselves that. But an unbiased historian can make an equally good case that Laud and his Arminian friends were godly. They simply defined the term differently. Webster is of course not alone in seeing godliness solely among the Puritans; Patrick Collinson has taken that line for years. But it would be better to use less judgmental terms and to be fairer to the genuine beliefs of those who were on the other side of these issues.

Linda Munk's volume is at least tangentially related, for it studies some of the beliefs of the Puritan ministers who did cross the ocean. Using the methods of literary criticism and comparative theology, she considers the writings of Jonathan Edwards, Increase Mather, and Edward Taylor. A fascinating aspect of the teachings of Edwards, she finds, was his belief in angel Christology: whenever God appears in the Old Testament as an angel this prefigures the presence of Christ, who was present in the burning bush. The new strand plucked out of the thought in Increase Mather is his conviction that the conversion of the Jews must occur prior to the second coming of the Messiah, which was often expected to take place in or about 1666. John Davenport, who was active on both sides of the Atlantic, shared this view. Finally, Munk discusses the significance of the Jewish feast of tabernacles (or booths) for Edward Taylor, who went so far as to suggest that Christ's birth took place, not on December 25, but during the traditional tabernacles celebration in September.

The title of Munk's book reflects the idea that the devil created a mousetrap with which to snare mortals but that Christ's blood purchased their redemption. Her three explorations are highly selective and are largely based on the examination of parallels between Old and New Testament passages, the former seen as prefiguring if not actually predicting the latter. While some of the conjunctions may strike the modern reader as strained or far-fetched, they were an essential aspect of the thought of her colonial divines and she has elucidated them with great sensitivity. Both books enrich our understanding of seventeenth-century English and American theology.

STANFORD LEHMBERG University of Minnesota