SOURCE: “Transplanting Disorder: The Construction of Misrule in Morton's New English Canaan and Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring 1997, pp. 258-80.

In this essay, Cartelli examines contrasting accounts written by Thomas Morton and Bradford of the controversy surround a maypole at Morton's Ma-re Mount settlement. Cartelli places the accounts in the context of Puritan debates about festive practices and wider concerns about disorder and misrule.

In his “Authors Prologue” to New English Canaan (1637), a work devoted to extolling the virtues of, and promoting, that portion of the New World largely dominated by its early Puritan settlers, and to deriding satirically these same Puritans for preventing people like himself from playing a formative role in its development, Thomas Morton likens New Canaan to “a faire virgin, longing to be sped / And meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed, / … being most fortunate / When most enjoy'd...