The Puritan Cosmopolis

The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination

Nan Goodman

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Resurrects importance of civil law tradition in Puritan legal history
Introduces importance of Puritan legal and literary past for present day concerns about globalism, territorial boundaries, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism
Presents a new look at Puritan literary narratives as stories of renewal and inclusion
First book to consider law of nations in Puritan thought

The Puritan Cosmopolis

The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination

Nan Goodman

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Description

The Puritan Cosmopolis traces a sense of kinship that emerged from within the larger realm of Puritan law and literature in late seventeenth-century New England. Nan Goodman argues that these early modern Puritans — connected to the cosmopolis in part through travel, trade, and politics — were also thinking in terms that went beyond feeling affiliated with people in remote places, or what cosmopolitan theorists call "attachment at a distance." In this way Puritan writers and readers were not simply learning about others, but also cultivating an awareness of themselves as ethically related to people all around the world. Such thought experiments originated and advanced through the law, specifically the law of nations, a precursor to international law and an inspiration for much of the imagination and literary expression of cosmopolitanism among the Puritans. The Puritan Cosmopolis shows that by internalizing the legal theories that pertained to the world writ large, the Puritans were able to experiment with concepts of extended obligation, re-conceptualize war, contemplate new ways of cultivating peace, and rewrite the very meaning of Puritan living. Through a detailed consideration of Puritan legal thought, Goodman provides an unexpected link between the Puritans, Jews, and Ottomans in the early modern world and reveals how the Puritan legal and literary past relates to present concerns about globalism and cosmopolitanism.

The Puritan Cosmopolis

The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination

Nan Goodman

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

The Puritan Cosmopolis

The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination

Nan Goodman

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Author Information

Nan Goodman, Professor of English, University of Colorado, Boulder

Nan Goodman is Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England (2012), and Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America (1998).

The Puritan Cosmopolis

The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination

Nan Goodman

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Reviews and Awards

"[This book] makes for interesting reading, providing insight into some ofthe most interesting events in Puritan New England history." - Michael Schuldiner, University of Akron, Early American Literature

"In this ambitious book, Nan Goodman offers us an outward-facing, cosmopolitan Puritanism built on the internalized idea of belonging to the entire world. It is the next chapter in a bigger, broader Puritanism. But it is also a lively essay in affiliation, community, and imagination, reorienting central dimensions of Puritan culture while inviting us to reflect on our own experiences of belonging." - Abram Van Engen, Washington University in St. Louis

"Puritans, we are often told, imagined early New England as a place apart. Nan Goodman tells a different story, of a vision that balanced the Puritans' well-known exceptionalism against the cosmopolitan lessons that they learned from the law of nations. Political, moral and even religious truths, it turned out, were not the exclusive province of God's elect but were available to men and women everywhere." - Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire

"Nan Goodman's wonderful The Puritan Cosmopolis adds something radically reorienting to the body of innovative scholarship that has, in recent years, brought the New England Puritans back into contact with the outside world, variously reframing them in terms of transatlantic culture, hemispheric relations, global systems, and fraught associations with their indigenous neighbors." - Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles

"In this compelling re-reading of the New England Puritans, Nan Goodman brilliantly ranges across seventeenth-century conceptions of international law, relations with the Ottoman empire, and theologies of history. Highlighting literary uses of the law, she offers us an engaging argument that Puritans may yet inform Americans today about the very meaning of cosmopolitanism." - Mark Valeri, Washington University in St. Louis