The author of this very large book is director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, an institution that he founded in 1997. He is also the son of Carl Bangs, a noted scholar of the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, who was famous for modifying the teachings of John Calvin. The book offers the research of a lifetime devoted to providing a more complete picture of the Pilgrims’ life between the time they left England for Holland in 1608 and 1609 and when the main body departed in 1620 for what became the Plymouth Colony in southeastern Massachusetts. Bangs’ prodigious research in English, Dutch, and American sources has given him no patience for historians who downplay the significance of the Plymouth settlers for later American civilization. Perhaps surprisingly, it has also resulted in what might be called a Narrative Against Bradford. Bangs appreciates William Bradford’s “Of Plimoth Plantation” for what it relates about the Pilgrims’ experience in America, but he also repeatedly criticizes this classic account of the long-serving Plymouth governor for underestimating the importance of his group’s Dutch interlude. For example, Bangs’ careful exegesis of what Bradford and others wrote about the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving in 1621 notes that almost all commentators—then as well as later—have neglected the precedent offered by the autumnal harvest celebration held every year in Leiden on the third of October as a day set apart for praising God. Bangs also has little time for what he once refers to as the “supernatural nonsense” that Bradford believed about God’s governance of daily events.
Bangs’ documentation includes the way that the Pilgrims’ community organization, marriage practices, house architecture, principles of free association, use of Scripture, rejection of church confessions, and attitudes toward foreigners (by extension, Native Americans) were all influenced to one degree or another by their Dutch experiences. The final payoff is to underscore how thoroughly dissenting these sojourners were, how completely they sought to be guided by the Bible instead of church authority, and how much they had learned about the godly pilgrim’s pathway before they arrived in New England. A massive bibliography and much detailed information on each of the early settlers add to the book’s value.
Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author most recently of The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (InterVarsity Press).
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