To My Dear and Loving Husband

The Puritan movement gradually emerged and gained force in the early years of the 17th century in England, when issues of religious doctrine and ritual were hotly debated. While Martin Luther’s Protestant Revolution had helped fuel the break between King Henry VIII and the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s, the creation of the Anglican Church as a state-sanctioned substitute did not satisfy the spiritual longings of all English subjects. In the ensuing decades, debates continued to rage as to which form of Protestant theology represented the “true” Christianity that could lead a person to salvation. This theological conflict resulted in a splintering within Protestantism itself into many competing religious sects.

Puritanism emerged as a response to what was seen as the “Catholic” tendencies of the Stuart monarchy, in particular the reign of King Charles I. Puritans rejected the idea of a traditional ecclesiastical hierarchy and the many aesthetic trappings of Anglican art and rituals, which they believed still adhered too closely to those of Catholicism. Instead, the Puritans advocated a strict and literal interpretation of the Bible, seeing sinfulness in public entertainments such as the cockfights and even the theater. They favored plain, utilitarian clothing and wished to have churches with unadorned interiors and simplified rituals. Above all else, they gradually began to hope of supplanting the monarchy with a more “godly” government—aspirations that led to the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 and the eventual execution of Charles I himself.

Since tensions between Puritans and their Anglican opponents were high in the lead-up to the English Civil War, emigration to the “New World” (i.e., North America) increasingly attracted devout Puritans who wished to found a new society in accordance with their religious beliefs. In America, these new Puritan settlements attempted to become “cities on the hill”—strict and observant communities dedicated to living piously. In 1630, Bradstreet herself became one of these immigrants, arriving in Massachusetts and spending the rest of her life there. The value of Bradstreet’s poetry is therefore not just literary but historical, as it offers special insight into the spiritual and emotional preoccupations of a Puritan woman living in one of the early American settlements.