What are the legacies of American Puritanism? The answers might surprise you. Somewhat paradoxically, these legacies are somehow both nearly invisible in the contemporary United States and also ubiquitous. On one hand, there is very little evidence of the theology or polity of seventeenth-century New England Puritans visible in today’s religious or political culture. It would be difficult to find an extant church offering a semblance of the services the Puritans attended, and even churches that claim a link to this time are quick to emphasize their evolution. At the same time, “puritan” persists in our culture as a byword for everything that is more repressive and less sexually evolved than we are. For instance, activists who want more freedom for nudity and sexual expression on social media often blame puritans for these restrictions. This differentiation between a contemporary Us and a puritan Them creates space for caricature that opens up space for what I call “settler kitsch,” an array of cartoonish, caricatured images of the settlers of New England, impossible to take seriously with their big hats and funny shoes. At the same time, these cartoons obscure an actual cognizance of Puritans by concealing the violence inherent in the settler colonial projects of Pilgrims and Puritans. As such, the principal legacies of Puritanism today are #freethenipple and settler kitsch.

Building on earlier accounts of print culture that consider its cultural work in puritan America, this essay considers where, how, and for whom print culture does and does not work. Informed by the “bummer theory” of print culture developed by Trish Loughran, Lara Cohen, and Jordan Stein, this account attempts to read slippages and silences alongside the familiar print performances of the era. Puritan print culture is inherently transatlantic, and understanding the affordances and obstacles presented by having this big, wet, and cold barrier between authors, presses, and audiences is crucial to understanding the vagaries of print for writers and readers in this era. Beyond physical barriers, there are also considerable social and cultural barriers, barriers that serve as a filter which produces the overwhelmingly orthodox, male, and white corpus of print that constitutes a major portion of the archive of puritan settlement. Finally, this essay considers the affordances and obstacles in place today that shape which puritan texts are available where and to whom.