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. “ Hardy curates a compelling archive of writing about pain from antiquity to the present that creates a rich interpretive context for New England Puritan writing. His examination of discourses of pain offers a fresh approach to familiar Puritan authors, genres, and tropes. ” ― Elisabeth Ceppi, Professor of English, Portland State University, USA “Lucas Hardy's compelling book deepens our understanding of the epistemology of pain in the Puritan imagination … It will be of use to both literary scholars and historians-or scholars of American studies more generally speaking-but also to readers interested in the social sciences, particularly in the fields of religious and (post)secular studies.” ― Transatlantica Lucas Hardy is Associate Professor of English at Youngstown State University, USA. Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, and an editor of Bloombury's New Directions in Religion and Literature series. Mark Knight is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. His books include Chesterton and Evil (2004), Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700-2000 (co-edited with Thomas Woodman, 2006), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (co-written with Emma Mason, OUP, 2006), An Introduction to Religion and Literature (2009) and Religion, Literature and the Imagination (co-edited with Louise Lee, 2009). Current projects include: a monograph entitled Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel ; a co-authored book (with Emma Mason) entitled Faithful Reading: Poetry and Christian Practice ; and a co-edited volume (with Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate) entitled A Bible and Literature Reader . With Emma Mason, Mark Knight edits the book series New Directions in Religion and Literature for Bloomsbury Academic.