Texts for Craig White's Literature Courses

Online Texts for Craig White's Literature Courses

Of Plymouth Plantation

William Bradford

Instructor's Overview of Chapters I-IV

Instructor's Notes:

Bradford (1590-1657) was governor of the Pilgrims' colony at Plymouth and a member of the church community from its earliest days in England and sojourn in Holland.
The early chapters are difficult but priceless—difficult because the English diction and style are 400 years old, priceless because an actual participant describes the religious and cultural background for the first permanent settlement of English-speaking colonists and the rise of America's dominant culture.
For those unfamiliar with this history, a difficulty with Bradford's text and its historical background is the many names for the group, among them Pilgrims, Puritans, Separatists, Non-Conformists, Radical Protestants, etc.

Chapters overview:

A short reading assignment—only the first 4 chapters (28 pages in paperback version), but they're the hardest chapters to read because Bradford is looking back and establishing the Pilgrims' small colony in this history of Reformation Europe.

Chapter 1 identifies Pilgrims with the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church and its influences in the 1500s and 1600s (see below)

Setting: "North parts" refers to Germany, England, and other areas of Northern Europe where Protestant Reformation was centered

The Pilgrims as radical Protestants were trying to establish a separate religious order from the "Church of England," which they associated with the Catholic Church or "popery." (The Church of England is Protestant but retains many Catholic influences--for example, that church's nearest American relation is the Episcopal Church.)

In contrast to the ceremony and splendor of Catholic church styles, the Puritans wish to return to an "ancient purity" and "primitive order" based on the simpler church community of the Apostles in the generation following Jesus's life on earth. (Such impulses remain a motive of Modern Evangelical Protestantism.)

The Church of England represents the bad old ways against which Bradford and other Protestants rebel, and for which they are "hunted and persecuted on every side," forcing them to leave their homes

end of chapter 1: English communities resolve to go into "the Low Countries" = the Netherlands, Holland

Chapters 2-4: concerns how the Pilgrims, persecuted in England, first moved to Holland ("the Low Countries" or The Netherlands).

In the Low Countries, the Pilgrims are much like later immigrants to America. They work hard and appreciate the Dutch atmosphere of religious tolerance, but . . .

Their children start assimilating to the freer Dutch ways. The adult Pilgrims don't like this. In Holland, they basically refuse the typical immigrant pattern.

Some then decide to move to "some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America, . . . where there are only savage and brutish men . . . little otherwise than the wild beasts . . . ."

In brief, the Pilgrims have no intentions of assimilating to the "savage and Brutish" Indian culture then in America.

In this regard the Pilgrims differ from later immigrant groups, who come to America with the idea of "joining up" with the existing system of government and economics (more or less)

The Pilgrims thus resemble the Jews in Exodus and their attitude toward the "Promised Land" of Canaan, where they are told not to intermarry or take up Canaanite ways.