With the arrival of Puritan settlers in New England in the middle decades of the 17th-century, accounts of sickness, colonial violence, and painful religious transformation quickly emerged, enabling new forms of testimonial writing in prose and poetry. Investigating a broad transatlantic archive of religious literature, historical medical science, and philosophies of sensation, this book explores how Puritan America contemplated pain and ascribed meaning to it in writing.

By weaving the experience of pained bodies into popular public discourse, Hardy shows how Puritans imagined the pained Christian body, whilst simultaneously marginalizing and vilifying those who expressed suffering by different measures, including Indigenous Americans and unorthodox colonists. Focusing on pain as it emerged from spaces of inchoate settlement and colonial violence, he provides new understandings of early American nationalism and connected racial tropes which persist today.