This loquacious soil: Language and religious experience in early America

This dissertation argues that early American religious leaders and lay people developed philosophically complex linguistic theories as a result of a critically under-explored tension between text and religious experience. I investigate the inner workings of this dilemma across early American genres of religious experience---sermons, tracts, letters, diaries, ethnographies, and trials. Reading the plain style sermons of John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, and Thomas Hooker, Anne Hutchinson's trial, seventeenth-century Quaker language tracts, ethnographic and missionary texts about the seventeenth-century Native Americans, and the Great Awakening diaries edited by Jonathan Edwards I argue that while originating in an immaterial experience of the invisible world, religious experience had a material life in visible signs, in biblical types, and in material texts, which imagined language as rooted in the material world.