In his ground-breaking study, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, historian David Hacket Fischer advances the thesis that four distinct English regional cultures were conveyed to North America, locating in four distinct early Colonial regions that comprise American regionalism. Fischer argues that settlers from distinct English regions brought their characteristic values, attitudes, traditions, and practices (i.e. cultures) to North America, where they have endured into the twentieth century. This thesis has been both defended and criticized, but numerous historians have supported it at list in its general outlines.
One of my tasks during the summer 2000 research visit to England was to try to recover some of this trans-Atlantic exchange as it pertains to one culture: East Anglian Puritans who comprised a significant percentage of those who traveled to Massachusetts during the Great Migration in the first half of the 17th century. To do so, I live for one month at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich (Norfolk), traveling around Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, and Essex, the region comprising East Anglia. UEA is the home of the Centre of East Anglian Studies as well as an American Studies program. In addition, the proximity of University of Cambridge--especially Emmanuel College, the cradle of Puritan theology--was enticing. It was, after all, the namesake of North America's first Cambridge (outside of Boston), and the alma mater of that town's benefactor, John Harvard. As a literary scholar, I was interested in the ways that landscape might reveal or gloss literature. UEA was attractive because it is the alma mater of my VaCIE-CEMP faculty exchange partner, Jacky Clift, whose daughter currently attends there as well. The proximity of Norwich to London and to its resources was attractive. Norfolk was likewise appealing since I have lived for a decade and a half in its junior version, Norfolk, Virginia, which was so named by Adam Thoroughgood, an early settler who came from West Norfolk.
I continued my research in New England, spending several weeks at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, where I had the opportunity to review early printed books and manuscripts, as well as the extensive collections of its Sterling Library, the Divinity School Library, and the Yale Center for British Art.
In addition, as my research progressed, I found myself increasingly drawn into a historical question: Why did the English Reformation occur and did it have any analogues in late medieval Catholicism? During the summer I presented a paper on a related topic, "Medieval New England Apocalypse: Puritan Appropriations of Catholic Discourses in Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom", but the more I researched that transition between Catholicism and Anglicanism or Puritanism, I found a wide range of perspectives, with a preponderance of revisionist historians re-examining the question. The "Whig" consensus (adapted from the polemical John Foxe) and carried into the twentieth century, had been stoutly advanced by A.G. Dickens as late as the 1950s: freedom-loving English laity were fed up with late medieval Catholic decadence and so England was ripe for a change, for which Henry VIII was the catalyst, his bishops the brains, his descendents (except Mary, of course) the engines.
However, since the 1970s a revisionist consensus has emerged in which this caricature of late medieval English Catholicism has been entirely rewritten and the tortuous history of the English Reformation more carefully documented.
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