Department of Religious Studies presents
Notes From The Field Spring 2025
Michael Ziser,
Associate Professor, Department of English,
Affiliated Faculty, GREL
The Wetlands Converted: Spiritual Geography in Early New England
As a host of place names—Cambridge, Lincoln, Hingham, Sudbury, etc.—indicate, many of the Puritan emigrants who left Europe in waves throughout the 17th century to populate the Massachusetts Bay Colony came from towns in the Fenlands of southwest England. Famous as the home of Fen Tigers, that region had an extraordinary history of religiously-inflected socioenvironmental conflict dating back as far as the era of Roman colonization in the first several centuries CE. Extending work I have done previously on the English geographical dimension of this story, this talk investigates the legacy of this envirocultural complex for American colonial settlers, who I argue transposed and recast the history of their English homeland (and temporary Dutch home of exile) onto the wetlands of New England—with profound consequences for those landscapes, the people living in them, and the environmental ideologies that emerged from them.
Tuesday May 6
12:00-1:00pm
Sproul 912
Lunch served. All are welcome.
