Inventing Eden

Zachary Hutchins’s Inventing Eden is a remarkable book. As its subtitle explains, Hutchins examines “primitivism, millennialism, and the making of New England.”

Many of us probably know that various colonial and early American boosters promoted the environs of the New World as paradisiacal, Edenic destinations in which beleaguered Europeans could quickly reap a bounty from rich new soil. Hutchins goes far beyond such commonplaces to examine how a “prevalent belief in Eden’s historicity and prophesied futurity led New England colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to model their orchards, bodies, educational endeavors, language, souls, and social institutions after the perfect pattern of Adam and Eve’s biblical paradise.”