“To Modell out a Land of So Much Worth”: Model Thinking in Colonial New England

This article illuminates the unexpected contributions of Puritan intellectual culture to the scientific practice of modeling. At the intersection of American literary history, the history of science, and the history of architecture, this article stakes the claim that Puritan model thinking contributed at once to a scientific willingness to be selectively wrong and to the epistemologies of ignorance that are central to early American colonialism. In the first section, the article contextualizes Puritan sermons on models for ethical behavior within a longer conceptual history of modeling in Europe and America to show how early American settlers refashioned model thinking into an epistemological practice for explaining material inequality in colonial society. In the second, the article explores how analogy-or, the literary device most explicitly shared by Puritan aesthetics and scientific modeling-sharpens the connection between the history of modern science and colonialist ideologies surrounding the selective admittance of error. Ultimately, a literary and intellectual history of colonial New England shows how this willingness to be adjacent to the truth is a mental attitude that interweaves scientific explanation, poetic analogy, and the cognitive foundations of settlement.