Religion, Family, and the Life Course: Explorations in the Social History of Early America

Religion, Family, and the Life Course explores the social history of early American religion through various stages of human life: childhood, adolescence, marriage, and death. In seven essays, Gerald Moran and Maris Vinovskis explore the Puritan family and religion; religious renewal, Puritan tribalism, and the family in seventeenth-century Milford, Connecticut; women and the church in seventeenth-century New England; early childhood in Puritan New England; children at risk in early modern England, colonial America, and nineteenth-century America; changes in the status of elderly ministers in colonial America; and death in early America. By addressing the centrality of the family to the study of religion, and by focusing on the relationship of religion to society, the authors provide a unique glimpse of early American culture.
Religion, Family, and the Life Course will be of interest to a wide variety of readers, including those in religious studies, family studies, education, history, and death and dying.