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The Imaginary Puritan
The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics
Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor

1. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to

Medieval Women, by Caroline Walker Bynum
2. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at
the Turn of the Century, by Walter Benn Michaels
3. Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the
Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, by David Lloyd
4. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in
Renaissance England, by Stephen Greenblatt
5. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the
Writing of History, by François Hartog, translated by Janet Lloyd
6. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents, by Leah S.
Marcus
7. The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan
Chivalry, by Richard C. McCoy
8. Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, edited by
Lee Patterson
9. Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from
Wyatt to Shakespeare, by Jonathan Crewe
10. Rabelais's Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext, by Samuel Kinser
11. Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Homiman, and the Struggle for the Abbey
Theatre, by Adrian Frazier
12. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain, by Alan Sinfield
13. Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and
the Dominant Culture, by Debora Kuller Shuger
14. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America,
by Gillian Brown
15. The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700, by
David Harris Sacks
16. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from "Utopia"
to "The Tempest," by Jeffrey Knapp
17. Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-
American Social Poetics, by José E. Limón
18. The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical
Age, by Jacqueline Lichtenstein, translated by Emily McVarish
19. Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600, by Randolph
Starn and Loren Partridge
20. Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France,
by Philippe Hamon, translated by Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire
21. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of
Personal Life, by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse
22. Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of
American Social Movements, by T. V. Reed
23. Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in
Thirteenth-Century France, by Gabrielle M. Spiegel
24. Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class
Family, by T. Walter Herbert
The Imaginary
Puritan
Literature, Intellectual Labor;
and the Origins of Personal Life

Nancy Armstrong
Leonard Tennenhouse

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1992 by
The Regents of the University of California
First Paperback Printing 1994

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Armstrong, Nancy.
The imaginary puritan : literature, intellectual labor, and the
origins of personal life / Nancy Armstrong, Leonard Tennenhouse.
p. cm. - (The New historicism ; 21)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-08643-0
1. English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and
criticism—Theory, etc. 2. English literature—18th c e n t u r y -
History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. American literature-
History and criticism—Theory, etc. 4. Great Britain—Intellectual
life—17th century. 5. Literature and history—Great Britain.
6. Literature and history—United States. 7. United S t a t e s -
Intellectual life. 8. Imagination—History. 9. A u t h o r s h i p -
History. 10. Self in literature. I. Tennenhouse, Leonard, 1942-
II. Title. III. Series.
PR431.A76 1992
820.9'004—dc20 91-40263
CIP

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, .ANSI Z39.48-1984. ©
For Henry, George, and Rey
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Imaginary Puritan 1

1. The Mind of Milton 27

2. The English Revolution 47
3. Family History 69
4. The Work of Literature 89
5. The Vanishing Intellectual 114
6. Signs of Personal Life 140
7. The Reproductive Hypothesis 160
8. Why Categories Thrive 196

Notes 217
Index 269
Acknowledgments

This project was supported by two grants from the Rockefeller Foun-
dation which allowed each of us to be part of the multiyear project on
narrative conducted at the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan Uni-
versity. Armstrong was a fellow at the center in 1987-88, and Tennen-
house in 1989-90. While a fellow at the Huntington Library in the winter
of 1987, Tennenhouse began the research on chapters 2 and 4. A section
of chapter 4 appeared as "Gender and the Work of Words," Cultural
Critique 13 (1989): 229-78, and a portion of chapter 7 as "The Interior
Difference: A Brief Genealogy of Dreams, 1650-1717," Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Studies 23 (1990): 458-78. For permission to reprint a revised version
of the first essay, we wish to thank the editor, Donna Przybylowicz. For
permission to reprint a version of the second, we thank the editors of
Eighteenth-Century Studies. Our special thanks go to Doris Kretschmer
and Tony Hicks for the care they took with the manuscript of this book.
The Imaginary Puritan could not have been conceptualized and writ-
ten without the enabling fantasy of the very kind of community it elab-
orates. The book exists for us as the instrument and record of a sequence
of scholarly exchanges that took place across the United States and in
Portugal over a three-year period. For this community, we are indebted
to the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University; to Richard
Vann and Richard Ohmann, respectively, who directed the Center while
we were fellows there; and to those members of the Wesleyan faculty
who provided the center of the Center. We thank you for creating a
milieu where ideas could be tried out, passed around, tinkered with, and

ix
X Acknowledgments

regarded with still more affection for the experience. During the alternate
school years, 1988-89 and 1990-91, we lived with the intellectual pres-
sure and generosity of a second community—again largely imagined be-
cause hardly the norm—as members of the Department of Comparative
Literature at the University of Minnesota. Our appreciation extends to
Susan McClary and to Paula Rabinowitz as well. Our summers were
spent in Solana Beach, where it was possible both to synthesize the pieces
of research and writing of the previous year as we walked along the beach
and to produce each of several drafts while looking out over the Pacific.
An early draft went out to yet another group of friends and colleagues
who were as generous with their time and criticism as the first. We cannot
imagine having proceeded further with the project without Joseph Witt-
reich's suggestions for chapter 1; the readings Paul Christianson, Richard
Vann, and Henry Abelove gave of chapter 2; Mark Poster's and Henry
Abelove's advice on the historians of the family, discussed in chapters 3
and 6; suggestions by Thomas Laqueur, John Frow, Michael Denning,
and Joan Scott for chapter 4; Richard Ohmann's insights concerning the
subject matter of chapter 5 as well as Bruce Robbins's response to an
early version of that chapter; Richard Vann's advice on research and
Felicity Nussbaum's comments on chapter 7; and the help of Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg, Doris Sommer, and Page duBois in conceptualizing
chapter 8. After these responses and suggestions found their way into
the manuscript, it went on the road. It grew both sharper and more
mellow as it encountered an unanticipated range of objections, questions,
and suggestions. Though we cannot possibly acknowledge these contri-
butions individually, we count on those who offered them to recognize
their handiwork in the finished product. We must thank Marjorie Garber
for providing a forum for an earlier version of chapter 4 at Harvard
University; John Carlos Rowe for devoting a seminar to our draft of
chapter 5 at the University of California Humanities Research Institute;
Irene and Boaventura Santos for organizing a challenging debate over
chapter 5 at the University of Coimbra; Kathleen Woodward for arranging
a very helpful discussion of chapter 7 at the Center for Twentieth-Century
Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Sharon Salinger for
making chapter 8 the focus of a Women's Studies colloquium at the
University of California-Riverside, sponsored by the University of Cali-
fornia Humanities Research Institute; and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and
Peter Stallybrass for organizing a seminar around this chapter at the
University of Pennsylvania.

Once all these exchanges had made their mark on the manuscript, it
Acknowledgments XI

had the good fortune to fall into the hands of several readers who were
as good-humored as they were honest, informed, shrewd, and practical.
For putting this kind of effort into our manuscript, we want to thank
George Mariscal, Josue Harrari, Homer Brown, J . Paul Hunter, and Mi-
chael Davidson. We owe a special debt to Stephen Greenblatt. With his
expert and unwavering support from beginning to end, we were able to
pursue our research and assemble our argument with a sense of intel-
lectual freedom that perhaps few scholars enjoy.
Another kind of gratitude is reserved for Henry Abelove, George
Mariscal, and Rey Chow, who were willing to entertain any idea—no
matter how pedestrian, how grandiose, how speculative, or how crudely
constructed—during the entire period it took to complete this book.
Where do the best ideas come from if not from such friends?
Introduction:
The Imaginary Puritan
In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically:
it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the
simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with
any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it orga-
nizes a world which is without contradictions because it is
without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evi-
dent, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean
something by themselves.
Roland Barthes, " M y t h T o d a y "

This is a book about the appearance of "the author" during the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and what happens to tradi-
tional historical narratives once one grants central importance to this
event. Indeed, for purposes of argument we have equated the appearance
of the author with nothing less than the onset of modernity itself. It
might be argued that there were writers before this moment—Ben Jonson
or Cervantes, perhaps—who imagined having much the same kind of
power as writers that modern readers now attribute to authors, but we
are not interested in arguing for the anomalous figure or the lone pro-
totype. By the appearance of "the author" we mean the emergence of
the group who first gave the term its modern meaning, the class of people
on whom writing conferred authority by placing them in a new and
distinctive relationship with themselves, with other people, and with a
world of objects.
We gladly concede that neither the subject matter nor the theoretical
issues this book addresses are all that new. Even the most conventional
histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England note the si-
multaneous lifting of censorship, the emergence of the popular press,
the growth of a mass readership, and the increasing importance of popular
media in determining the outcome of political conflict. Each of these

1
2 Introduction

events, furthermore, has been the focus of any number of specialized

studies. While such scholarship has proved invaluable to our project, it
is grounded on historiographical assumptions that critical theory chal-
lenged some time ago. With nearly flawless consistency, accounts of the
modern period assume that events occurring to, through, or within writ-
ing belong in a secondary or derivative relationship to economic, political,
and social history.1 To compose a history of such events, we therefore
turned away from the very materials that history most often uses to
explain the relationship between past and present-day Western culture.
We have focused instead on materials that usually testify to effects rather
than causes, and we have privileged what are generally thought to be
contingent rather than necessary relations among them. In granting such
phenomena a central role in our account of modernity, we have given
them causality, and thus, one might say, a kind of necessity. In doing so,
we will be questioning the basic categories of modern historiography.
We should perhaps begin to lay out our argument by saying that in
identifying the problem we have with traditional literary criticism and
British historiography, we found it advantageous to downplay the schism
that developed within poststructuralism more than two decades ago over
the question of history.2 In Of Grammatology, Derrida asks his readers
to relinquish the hierarchical relationship between speech and writing
that literate members of modern European cultures pretty much take
for granted. He invites them to invert the commonsense assumption that
writing necessarily presupposes speech, which in turn presupposes human
thought and feeling. This chain of assumptions makes truth depend on
tracing the printed word back to an origin within an individuated con-
sciousness—what is meant by an "author." Indeed, he argues, this com-
monsense epistemology perpetuates the belief that where there is writing
there must once have been someone thinking those thoughts and putting
them into words. Despite the rhetorical battle he waged with Derrida
almost thirty years ago, Foucault's work proceeds from this same prop-
osition.3 He questions only its universality. Derrida exposes the ahisto-
ricity of any history that anchors language to a world of referents outside
and prior to the act of inscription. Foucault uses another tactic. He turns
history against itself by historicizing the very classification system that
makes history possible, which includes the distinction between that
which originates outside the individual consciousness and that which
comes from within it, as well as the distinction between words and things.
He does this by giving the Derridean inversion a specific location in space
and time.
Introduction 3

At some time in the late seventeenth century, according to this delib-

erately strange retelling of the story, certain people in France, England,
Germany, and presumably elsewhere in western Europe undertook a proj-
ect whose enormity could be understood only in retrospect. For Foucault,
the thoroughgoing, irreversible effects of the venture rested not so much
on the classification system they managed to put in place as on a twofold
fact of its semiotic character: the tendency to individuate things and
people by assigning them a place and function, and the tendency to do
this first of all in writing. It was when a whole new group of people
began to write—and to write, we might add, for a wholly different purpose
than ever before—that the inversion which empowered writing must have
taken place. As words began to master things through various and subtle
procedures of classification, writing began to imply a source in individual
thought, and that source consequently became the means of mastering
both objects and other people. If Derrida calls attention to the ahisto-
ricity of traditional historiography, then Foucault historicizes the sym-
bolic behavior that simultaneously produces an origin for meaning out-
side and prior to language at the same time that it declares one can know
anything—a person, an idea, a disease—by determining where it came
from. He historicizes the moment when histories in this general sense
began to provide the explanatory logic of Western culture.
By writing his off-centered histories—of madness, of the reclassifica-
tion of nature, of the clinic, of sexuality, of the modern penitentiary—
Foucault argues that modern history has heretofore been turned back-
ward, so that it can specify where something that presently exists "came
from." That is to say, history by its very nature is a kind of just-so story
that gives the operative categories of industrial cultures a location well
in the past, thus allowing the present order of things to emerge as so
many facts of human nature. For Foucault, however, history also offers
the only way out of the dilemma posed by history. One must give up
the whole pretense of knowing the past (which only conceals the effects
of writing about it); one must show precisely when and how the most
basic categories of modern culture developed and how they related to
one another. Rather than explain how a particular sequence of humane
reforms transformed the scaffold into the modern penal institution, for
example, Discipline and Punish offers the reader a snarl of contingen-
cies—theories, procedures, architectural drawings—that worked together
to produce an entirely new understanding of crime. Foucault assembles
the remains of particular practices from various local sites to show how,
when viewed retrospectively, these practices attributed crime to asocial
4 Introduction

tendencies within the individual or, more precisely, to aspects of human

nature that had not been properly managed.
His account pursues the principle of overdetermination orchestrating
the development of an institutional culture with the production of people
who require its managerial procedures. In providing us with such an
account, his point is never to make one see the past as it really was. His
concern is wholly for the present. He submits to literary analysis precisely
those statements that seem literally true. Then, having turned fact into
metaphor, he can establish what kind of ideological work such metaphors
do. Foucault's histories no more presume to say what things, people,
words, thoughts, or feelings are now than they do to say what these
things used to be. He simply wants to demonstrate how they were written
into existence in one way rather than some other. The only true history
is the history of discourse, or how an entire field of symbolic practices
became meaningful in relation to specific kinds of writing that could be
called knowledge.
Foucault begins from the assumption that history actually authorizes
certain power relations in the here and now by giving them a source in
earlier periods of time. As it establishes narrative continuity between
modern phenomena and their earlier counterparts, history also establishes
an unbreachable distinction between the subject and object of writing.
To overturn history, one simply has to demonstrate that words come
chronologically as well as ontologically before the things they are pre-
sumed to represent and the differences that already exist among those
things. Those of us who are willing to entertain this possibility have had
little difficulty finding evidence to substantiate the inversion of traditional
historical priorities. 4 Such a claim can be made with unwavering confi-
dence, however, only until one tries to historicize the moment when
writing and writers changed places and words began to create a new
source for themselves in the kind of individual they named as their author.
At that point, one must address the question of who authored the author.
It is all well and good to argue, as poststructuralism has done, that
writing produces its author rather than the other way around. It is just
as important to understand that writing did not always imply such a
source. For only by dispelling the universality of "the author" can one
understand the significance of writing that called authors—countless va-
rieties of them—into being. But there is still a trade-off involved in de-
mystifying the author, as there is, no doubt, in any act of démystification.
The magic simply gets relocated, and theory tends to mystify writing
instead of authors. In Foucault's accounts of modernity, for example,
Introduction 5

writing ceases to operate as an effect of other causes, located mainly in

the church and the nobility, and becomes a cause in its own right. To
give writing this priority, he grants it the capacity to authorize itself, and
the will to do so, at some point in the late seventeenth or the eighteenth
century. Before relying on Foucault, then, one has to consider what is
gained—theoretically, historically, or otherwise—by deciding to place all
the emphasis where he did. To what advantage does one substitute "dis-
course" not only for "authors" but also for "money," "Parliament,"
nationalism, man's relentless will to dominate, his unquenchable thirst
for freedom, or any of the other causes traditionally thought to have
ushered in the modern age? If this attribution of causality produces only
another mystification, why undertake such a project at all?
We have fixed on writing because it is on this point that poststruc-
turalism inadvertently collaborates with traditional historiography in re-
fusing to grant writing much causality, if any at all. Poststructuralism
charges writing with the mysterious power to create what it presumes
to represent, while historiography unselfconsciously exploits that power
whenever it claims to be putting us in touch with things that no longer
exist and the people who used to know them. Some investigators use
the idea of textuality as a way of closing this gap between literature and
history. Let us think of history itself as a text composed of various bits
of cultural material, symbolic systems, and social practices, they say.
Indeed, they add, let us assume further that descriptions or theories of
that text add something to the object of analysis and can therefore trans-
form the very nature of its being. All well and good, we say—until one
finds that the old opposition between philosophical " t e x t " and historical
"narrative" has been put back in place.
To be historical, others insist, a text must have a narrative that connects
it to the larger narrative of history. Thus, for example, after demonstrating
the literary element in nineteenth-century historiography, Hayden White
connects the figurative behavior of specific historical texts to " d e e p "
narrative structures that are somehow universal to human cultures, and
yet historical in that they can enter into play in a specific field through
one of several protocols that fix the field to its moment in time. As he
says of "Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt among the his-
torians, and of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce among the philos-
ophers" of nineteenth-century history: "through the disclosure of the
linguistic ground on which a given idea of history was constituted, I have
attempted to establish the ineluctably poetic nature of the historical work
and to specify the prefigurative element in a historical account by which
6 Introduction

its theoretical concepts were tacitly sanctioned." 5 T h e influence of this

residual structuralism, or layered model of textual production, is still very
much with us and could indeed be said to linger in Fredric Jameson's
idea that the master narrative of a given age offers one way of getting at
the political unconscious of the people who actually lived during that
time. 6 If not human nature, then a peculiar residue of the folktale, and
thus a sense o f the archaic, clings to the concept o f narrative whenever
it provides a quasi-somatic bond between the text and the people.
But it is not only the humanistic side of the debate that recognizes
the power of narrative. Whereas White and Jameson identify it as a
"deep," or prewritten, dimension of collective human experience, Fou-
cault and Derrida assume that the story is all on the surface; narrative
is what produces the illusion of depth. For Foucault, narrative is more
specifically what creates a cause-and-effect relationship among people
and things that leaves words out of the picture. T h e superficial aspect
of human experience is really all there is, since it produces the language
of the nonself, the underclass, the non-Western, the otherwise gendered,
and thus the unconscious. This being the case, why can't one simply
look at narrative as a function of the surface? Because narrative form,
no matter how formal, tends to drag one back into the ahistorical quag-
mire of deep meaning. Thus to reject narrative is in a sense to acknowl-
edge its peculiar ability to locate meaning outside of words themselves.
Poststructuralism may have identified the problem, but it has not found
a way to resolve it. Even Foucault leaves the opposition between text
and narrative alone, and this makes him vulnerable on two counts. He
has committed what traditional humanism regards as "the sin" of post-
structuralism, that of having focused on the text rather than on the
experiences of real people. At the same time, poststructuralism suspects
Foucault of telling stories without explaining exactly why and how he
is doing so. His work somehow embodies both sides of the question of
history; it is at once too concerned with the text and not concerned
enough. But whether narrative constitutes an a priori and more material,
because collective, reality or whether it is a function of the text to create
the illusion that its words have come to life in a kind of motion picture,
the verdict for narrative is virtually the same. It is assigned to a realm
of sub- or pretextuality.
We want to question the distinction between text and narrative, if for
no other reason than that such an interrogation is long overdue. It is
probably true, as Geoff Bennington protests, that narrative ultimately
introduces an element of self-deception into critical discourse. " T h e
Introduction 7

claim to be able to discern the real continuities and thus to ground those
fantasies at least partially in 'truth' depends simply on the illusion of an
intelligentsia as subject of science to stand outside and above that reality
and those fantasies. This," he asserts, "is on its own terms not at all a
historical or historicising position" (25). But what if one were to consider
the narrative as purely a function of the surface? What if it were nothing
else but the traces of the labor that went into organizing various materials,
representations, representations of representations, into a reproducible
and consumable body of knowledge that could be converted into
speech—that could indeed produce a speech community? Then narrative
could not be distinguished from writing in a fully historicized material
sense. Narrative would have to be seen as the principle by which a modern
scientific culture "works." 7 If such a definition o f narrative bears a residue
of nineteenth-century idealism, this cannot be helped; that residue is part
of the history of the concept o f intellectual labor itself. But concealing
that labor has not at all curtailed its historical effects, as we will explain
in subsequent chapters. Its disappearing act only mystifies the way intel-
lectual labor works and the power it wields in modern cultures. Such
labor disappears into writing, which in turn melts either into things or
else into thin air, where it seems to refer to nothing at all. Indeed, if
history is the story that scientific cultures tell about themselves, then the
story apparently does its work by simultaneously empowering writing
and rendering it transparent. T h e story of intellectual labor consequently
remains to be told.
To privilege writing among the various changes that are said to have
inaugurated our age is therefore to question historiography at several
points at once: on the material terrain of social history, where labor and
money make things happen; on the epic battlefields of political history,
where armies and parliaments determine the course of the events; and
on the loftier plateaus of intellectual history, where one set of ruling
ideas inevitably gives way to another. We will argue that late-seventeenth-
century England saw certain changes in intellectual and artistic practice
that were both startling and profound. These changes simultaneously
called into being an author with a personal life and transformed irre-
versibly what writing was, because they changed forever what writing
did and could henceforth do. Writing could make demands in the name
of the author on behalf of others. Thus, one can imagine, it created a
sense among certain people that the so-called author—no longer to be
understood as the spokesperson of God, king, or some lesser p a t r o n -
exemplified the English people themselves.
8 Introduction

Each of Foucault's histories identifies a strategic location where dis-

course can be observed at work, producing the cultural ground in which
capital could take seed and flourish. He organizes these accounts by
overturning the two presuppositions common to virtually all other his-
tories of the modern period. He uses the strategies of history to show
that changes in ruling ideas preceded changes in economic production
and consumption. He also makes history argue that changes in the pro-
duction and consumption of "ruling ideas," the emergence of "dis-
course," a certain form of "literacy," and distribution of "power" or
"cultural capital" preceded the appearance of "the author," a vernacular
"literature," and a horizontal affiliation among those people whom eigh-
teenth-century scholarship considers part of a "readership."8 In this way,
Foucault demonstrates how words produced an object world precisely
when they presumed to do no more than accurately describe and classify
one. He also demonstrates that words produced a historically new form
of individual as they began to reveal that, for centuries presumably,
secrets had been repressed within each mind concerning the relationship
between that mind and the body in which it was enclosed; these were
the secrets of such an individual's desire. Two meanings of the word
"subject" can consequently be—and often have been—used to describe
the modern subject. He is, as Foucault explains, "subject to someone
else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a con-
science or self-knowledge."9 What Foucault does not explain is how the
two inversions are related: how did those people who possessed the new
"self-knowledge" acquire power over those who were simply subjects in
the first sense, and what does that have to do with the process by which
words gained ascendance over things? Both of these inversions are re-
quired to place rational man in a position of cultural authority. This
omission in Foucault's account—how it happened—is what our book
attempts to elaborate.
The phrase "Imaginary Puritan" refers to a logical, ontological, and
historical gap shared by historicisms old and new, as well as to the
theoretical and rhetorical sutures that insist one has received a whole
picture of the seventeenth century, despite the time shift form early
modern to modern that in fact severs one side of this cultural territory
from the other.10 To the gap and the continuity concealing it we have
assigned the name "puritan," because the word invokes the generic in-
tellectual ancestor that British and American scholars identify as the
source of the power that makes individuals into subjects and vice versa.
The puritan in question is "imaginary" because the term does not come
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