49

Although scholars have begun to explore the emotions of early Protestant groups, including those of the Puritans, they have not considered whether there might be differences in the emotions expressed and felt by Puritan men and women. This paper analyzes a set of confessions recorded for the period 1648-1649 by Thomas Shepard, who led the Puritan church of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Three different approaches are employed. The first considers “basic emotions,” the second examines the emotions considered as such by the Puritans themselves, and the third observes the emotions in the context of their “practice”– that is, in the context of habitual behavior. It concludes that there were indeed some gender differences in the emotional lives of these Cambridge women and men.