feminist scholars may actually create more harm than good in their efforts to cast
early modern women writers as feminists.^175 Perhaps it would be wiser to heed the
sagacious voice of Susan Juster,“[w]as early modern faith so powerful because it
effectively harnessed the enormous emotional and physical satisfactions of sex for
spiritual purposes, or did human relationships benefit from an infusion of the erotics
of spiritual communion into the intimate lives of men and women?”^176
Puritans of the seventeenth-century lived with a greater gender fluidity than
the next century.^177 It is dangerous to read the contemporary uncertainty regarding
gender back into the Puritan culture and wise to recognize that the Puritans were
conscious of the mystery within the metaphoric language of spiritual marriage.
Godbeer asserts that, “Puritan men who understood their theology had no reason to
believe that their masculinity would be threatened by their union as brides to Christ:
the son of God was to marry not men and women but the souls of men and women.
That distinction was important since souls did not adopt the sex of the bodies they
inhabited.”^178 He continues by insisting; “[t]he use of marital and romantic imagery
in a spiritual context did not pose a problem for male New Englanders since notions
(^) Female Piety in New England (^). Similar claims were made in the monastic period, see
Burrows, “Foundations for Erotic Christology,” 478 175 - 9.
Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 214-6, cf. esp 123 for her warning of
the danger of “over reading” by feminist critics. 176
Juster, “Eros and Desire in Early Modern Sexuality,” 205. Dillon asserts, “What is
striking about the persistent use of the eroticized Bride of Christ tropology is the
extent to which this language does not seem to induce anxiety or homosexual panic, but rather serves as a dominant, culturally accepted account of masculinity among
Puritans.” “Nursing Fathers and Brides of Christ,” 134. 177
Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, 55, 79-83, 357n74; “Performing
Patriarchy,” 291, 293, 301, 303, 306, 323; Hardman Moore, “Sexing the Soul,” 183-4;
Tom Webster, “Gender Inversion and Canticles,” 149, 151, 159-61; and Longfellow,
Women and Rel 178 igious Writings, 83.
Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, 79. cf. “Performing Patriarchy,”
- For an opposing view see Tom Webster, “Gender Inversion and Canticles,” 1578. -