Jonathan Edwards and the Spiders: Tracing the Ecological in Early American Environmental Thought (Sheila Byers):
Jonathan Edwards was fascinated by spiders. Long before he dangled a metaphorical spider over the fire in “Sinners in the Hands of Angry God,” he wrote his earliest texts on the movements of spiders in the woods near his Connecticut Colony childhood home. This talk focuses on Edwards’s spider writings as indicative of his stance as an environmental thinker. I argue that Edwards expresses two divergent views of the environment: the first an orderly natural world determined by divine necessity and organized by human thought, and the second a swarming, ecological environment that refuses formulaic thinking. Following the implications of the second stance adds a surprisingly materialist and contingent element to what is generally accepted as Edwards’s strictly idealist, determinist philosophy.

“To Modell Out a Land of So Much Worth”: Model Thinking in Colonial New England – (Ethan Plaue):
This talk illuminates the unexpected contributions of Puritan intellectual culture to the scientific practice of modeling. At the intersection of American literary history, the history of science, and the history of architecture, this talk stakes the claim that Puritan model thinking contributed at once to a scientific willingness to be selectively wrong and to the epistemologies of ignorance that are central to early American colonialism. An abbreviated version of an article in preparation, this talk will be drawn from the article’s first section, which traces the conceptual history of modeling in Europe and America with special reference to the celebrated sermon, “A Modell for Christian Charity,” traditionally attributed to the Puritan leader John Winthrop. The sermon, I argue, refashions model thinking into an epistemological practice most appropriate for explaining material inequality in early American colonial society.