Abstract
My alternative dissertation investigates the New England Puritans’ communications media and beliefs in angels, discussing its findings through three different media objects: an online course on the Puritans’ media ecology, a scholarly research essay on Puritan women’s angel sightings and Cotton Mather’s views on them, and a pedagogical essay on teaching Cotton Mather’s Coelestinus. These objects can be read in any order, forming an alinear web, network, or environment of their own. My scholarly essay examines the significance of Cotton Mather’s writings about Puritan women encountering angels in the 1690s, arguing that Mather came to associate angels with the feminine and developed a viewpoint of women as spiritual models, even as he also seemed to have disparaged women’s spirituality in other ways. My pedagogical essay shows how instructors can use Cotton Mather’s Coelestinus to help students come to complex and nuanced understandings of the Puritans, arguing for the value of continuing to teach about the Puritans. Finally, my online course teaches its target audience of young professionals about diverse facets of the Puritan media ecology, through twenty-two audio lectures, discussion questions for each lecture, and group project options. My dissertation argues that the Puritans had a flourishing media ecology, which included psychologically direct, nonlinguistic impulses, shaped particularly by how angels seemed to have communicated with Puritan women. It also argues for teaching about the Puritans through a media lens in order to help students see them in a deeper and more refreshing way.