“Love was their banqueting house, love was their wine”
When it comes to sex and the Puritans, truth is more interesting than fiction. Despite their reputation as fun haters who reviled sex, the Puritans were nothing if not passionate – about God and about love. They were, in fact, ridiculed in England for their passion, their conviction that every part of life really mattered, that every part of life had to be appreciated and made the most of, honored and recognized as a gift from God. This included physical sex, which the Puritans believed to be a preview of the joys that awaited them in heaven. This elevated sex without stripping it of its physicality: an experience so beautiful and so intense was a gift from God.
The Puritans did require sex to take place within marriage; anything outside of marriage was not meaningful love but empty lust. Marriage was a commitment you made to another person’s wellbeing and happiness, and sex was a big part of that. But, as most people would agree today, it’s hard to take lasting pleasure in sex when it doesn’t come with commitment. So for the Puritans, sex was about your earthly marriage partner. But that didn’t mean it was watered-down and dutiful. Sex was meant to be joyous and transformative. John Winthrop, early Massachusetts’ most important and respected leader, clearly felt this, as his letters to his wife Margaret show; when they were apart, they both suffered, wanting “more familiar communion.” As he wrote,
My only beloved Spouse, my most sweet friend & faithful companion… Being filled with the joy of thy love, and wanting opportunity of more familiar communion with thee, which my heart fervently desires, I am constrained to ease the burden of my mind by this poor help of my scribbling pen…
Puritan marriage manuals stressed the importance of strong partnerships. English woodcut, early 18th century. Image: Wellcome Collection
“Sex within marriage was a foretaste of eternal ecstasy to come. ”
It was natural for Winthrop to connect union with Christ to the physical union of sex:
…Christ in his love so fills our hearts with holy hunger and true appetites, to eat and drink with him and of him in this his sweet Love feast, which we are now preparing unto, that when our love feast shall come…
… the ground and pattern of our love is no other but that between Christ and his dear spouse… my well-beloved is mine and I am his: love was their banqueting house, love was their wine, love was their ensign, love was his invitings, love was her faintings, love was his apples, love was her comforts, love was his embracings, love was her refreshing: love made him see her, love made her seek him; love made him wed her, love made her follow him, love made him her saviour, love makes her his servant. Love bred our fellowship, let love continue it, & love shall increase it, until death dissolve it.
Sex in marriage was the only pleasure on the fallen earth that was not dangerous, did not have to be second-guessed, and provided a one-to-one comparison with union with Christ. Sex within marriage was a foretaste of eternal ecstasy to come.
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Lori Stokes is an independent scholar and author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638-1649: Heroic Souls. London: Palgrave Macmillan, December 2020.