ABSTRACT
The apparent provincialism of Jonathan Edwards’s context in semirural colonial Massachusetts can belie the location of Puritan New England in the transoceanic interculture of eighteenth-century European colonialism. In his pastoral protest to market forces one can see how Edwards understood the newly emerging “modern self” and how he hoped to counter it with a call to surrender to divine beauty, which begins to move us closer to exploring how beauty and bodily ecstasy intersect for Edwards. At least in the first blushes of revival, Edwards imagined the global community would have the potential to challenge the market forces he believed were threatening to undo humanity and he had reason to believe it might be so. Edwards was fully engaged in his early modern circum-Atlantic context in debating what kind of subjectivity and forms of social order were most needed to navigate the world as it was being reinvented.
