Mainpoints on a Little Commonwealth by John Demos
Demos’ view of Puritan Life through A Little Commonwealth A Little Commonwealth by John Demos, can be best described as an essay turned novel, which explains domestic puritan life. Demos’ original workings were drawn up as a graduate seminar paper in 1963. His idea was to display the demography of Plymouth families. In the book, he decided to split up each category into chapters. First, he would define the physical setting involving housing, furnishings, and clothing. Part two described the structure of the household. This section included membership, husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, and wider kin connections. Last, in part three, Demos outlined themes of individual development such as infancy and childhood, coming of age, and the later years. Demos’s goal in his work was to branch out from customary historical literature. Instead of relying on quantitative history, he depended on psychohistory, using psychology to describe Puritan life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How did he accomplish this? Demos’ guide for, A Little Commonwealth, was constructed from psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s “eight stages of man”. Demos compared his workings to another historian by the name of Edmund Morgan and his monograph, The Puritan Family. Morgan used literary materials such as sermons and essays. Along with those materials, Demos uses -wills, inventories, physical artifacts, and court records. Demos argues that in order to grasp the big picture of Puritan life in the 1600-1700’s, branches of behavioral sciences (anthropology, sociology, and psychology) should not be ignored. John Demos’ purpose of A Little Commonwealth is to introduce historians the use of theory, and to deliberate what likely happened, when firm knowledge is absent. Erik Erikson created the eight stages of man. John Demos overall model of individual development was based on Erikson’s mechanisms. The first stage is infancy, birth to eighteen months. This time of