The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century by Perry Miller
Published 1939 · 528 pages · 250,000 words · about 22 hours at an average pace · History, Religion & Spirituality, Essays & Criticism
How hard is The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century to read?
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
- Miller uses theological and logical terms such as covenant of grace, preparation, Ramism and federal theology, alongside archaic quotations from Puritan sermons. His own prose is erudite but clear, more demanding than Orientalism-style academic writing in its period diction.
- Sentence structure: 66 out of 100
- Miller writes long, balanced academic sentences with embedded qualifications, and he quotes seventeenth-century periodic sentences at length. The reading is steady work but not tangled.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- The book concerns theology, epistemology, logic and the theory of society, with sermons as the concrete evidence. Ideas are the subject throughout.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Miller packs in dozens of ministers, treatises, doctrinal disputes and rhetorical systems across a dense, heavily sourced narrative of ideas. Few pages are light.
How The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century is regarded
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.