Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England - Hardcover

In this ambitious, deeply researched, and wide-ranging book, Hutchins offers fresh perspective on early New England through an examination of one surprisingly fertile concept: the biblical Eden. (Thomas S. Kidd, author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution)

Hutchins draws on a rich array of sources and events in colonial New England. Due to the wealth of material, which has traditionally attracted scholars to this place and time, Hutchins tends to make New England history the history of the United States and indeed of transatlantic evangelical culture. (Kenneth P. Minkema, Yale University, Georgetown University, The American Historical Review)

Hutchins, with reading as wide as it is perceptive, demonstrates convincingly that biblical Eden occupied a surprisingly pervasive place in the literature of New England and much of the rest of the American colonies. Whether as literal truth, myth, or metaphorical ideal, paradise loomed large in colonial minds. Among this fine book's many virtues is its genuinely transatlantic character, as Hutchins draws together William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards with the likes of Francis Bacon, George Herbert, and John Milton for an unusually illuminating treatment of his edenic theme. (Mark Noll, author of America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln)

In this innovative study, Hutchins persuasively demonstrates that belief in the Garden of Eden - as both historical model and millennial hope - shaped how colonial New Englanders approached their environment, bodies, language, and more. Significantly, Inventing Eden also suggests how enduring beliefs in the Edenic ideal shaped later American history. (Matthew J. Grow, co-author of Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism)

Inventing Eden is a beautifully written book. Hutchins intertwines fresh paradigmatic insights with the wide sweep of this carefully researched study. (Reiner Smolinski, editor of The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather: An Edition of "Triparadisus")

As Christopher Columbus surveyed lush New World landscapes, he eventually concluded that he had rediscovered the biblical garden from which God expelled Adam and Eve. Reading the paradisiacal rhetoric of Columbus, John Smith, and other explorers, English immigrants sailed for North America full of hope. However, the rocky soil and cold winters of New England quickly persuaded Puritan and Quaker colonists to convert their search for a physical paradise into a quest for Eden's less tangible perfections: temperate physiologies, intellectual enlightenment, linguistic purity, and harmonious social relations. Scholars have long acknowledged explorers' willingness to characterize the North American terrain in edenic terms, but Inventing Eden pushes beyond this geographical optimism to uncover the influence of Genesis on the iconic artifacts, traditions, and social movements that shaped seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American culture. Harvard Yard, the Bay Psalm Book, and the Quaker use of antiquated pronouns like thee and thou: these are products of a seventeenth-century desire for Eden. So, too, are the evangelical emphasis of the Great Awakening, the doctrine of natural law popularized by the Declaration of Independence, and the first United States judicial decision abolishing slavery. From public nudity to Freemasonry, a belief in Eden affected every sphere of public life in colonial New England and, eventually, the new nation. Spanning two centuries and surveying the work of English and colonial thinkers from William Shakespeare and John Milton to Anne Hutchinson and Benjamin Franklin, Inventing Eden is the history of an idea that shaped American literature, identity, and culture.