Lucas Hardy, Theologies of Pain: Literary Bodies and Afflicted Forms in Puritan New England

In Theologies of Pain: Literary Bodies and Afflicted Forms in Puritan New England, Lucas Hardy explores how Puritan America contemplated pain and ascribed meaning to it in writing. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, American Puritans aligned their expressions of hurt with the language of Christian salvation, devising and carefully maintaining a discourse of providential pain that he describes as a “doctrine of affliction.”The concept of a “doctrine of affliction” originates in...