The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change

Why did Puritan parents deliberately cultivate an attitude of aloofness toward their children? Why did they carefully nurture a terror of death? Why did Puritan funerals grow more and more elaborate, contrary to doctrine and tradition? Conversely, why was legislation required by the 1780s to guarantee that graves received at least minimal care?

In this profound and moving book, a historian uses the narrow experience of America’s earliest New England settlers, the Puritans, as a window through which doctors and nurses, psychologists and sociologists, clergy and ordinary mortals can gain a new perspective on American attitudes toward death in the present.

Stannard illuminates the connections between death ritual and the evolution of community purpose and cultural self perception–treating not only the place of death ritual in Puritan culture but the death of that culture itself. Finally, he deals with the shape of death in modern America in the context of his new historical perspective.

Poetry, tomb sculpture, diaries, schoolbooks, religious tracts, sermons, and official legislative records back up an argument that is frequently informed by insights derived from psychology, sociology, and anthropology.