Review of Jonathan Edwards, A Life. George Marsden. New Haven; London : Yale Univ Pr, 2003.

Abstract

By now, it would seem there is not much left to be said about George Marsden’s commanding biography of Jonathan Edwards. It has been awarded prizes too numerous to list, (but including the Bancroft, the Merle Curti, and the Grawemeyer). It has been praised as a “magisterial synthesis,” and the “best book ever written about America’s … greatest theologian” (comments by Edmund Morgan and Sam Logan from dust jacket.) It is, indeed, a much-needed book. The first major biography of Edwards in over half a century, it is arguably the first biography ever to attempt to take the measure of the whole man. Marsden’s signal contribution is in creating a cogent, compelling synthesis of the rapidly expanding field of Edwards scholarship. In a tightly wrought narrative that clocks in at just over 500 pages, Marsden elegantly braids together this new scholarship with the raw materials that have only recently been made more widely accessible through the efforts of Harry Stout, Kenneth Minkema and the others at the Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale who carry on the work started by Perry Miller. A look at the newly launched website of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale (http://edwards.vale.edu/) quickly makes apparent the magnitude of Marsden’s achievement and why such a biography could only have been written recently. The website will soon make available all 26 volumes of the published Works of Jonathan Edwards series, representing about 25,000 manuscript pages of Edward’s writings. An additional 25,000 pages will be added over the next few years.