SOURCE: Henigman, Laura. “Flowing and Reflowing: Dialogic Emanations.” In Coming into Communion: Pastoral Dialogues in Colonial New England, pp. 151-76. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Henigman analyzes the manner in which Jonathan Edwards appropriated and revised his wife's account of her experiences and used it in his own writing.

In the winter of 1742, western Massachusetts was in the midst of a religious revival. People throughout the commonwealth—and in other colonies as well—were reporting extraordinary experiences of the Holy Spirit. Seven years previously, the towns of the Connecticut Valley had provided a preview of the current revival, and Northampton's minister, Jonathan Edwards, had published a widely read account, called A Faithful Narrative of Surprising Conversions, of the way in which the Spirit swept through the region, affecting all manner of people with religious renewal, causing many to join the church, and...