Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives: Free will Christian Women in Colonial Maryland. By Debra Meyers. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. xiv, 249 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-253-34193-0.)

Abstract

In Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives—only the last of whom, incidentally, receive substantive consideration in her analysis—Debra Meyers intends to provide at least a partial corrective to what she correctly notes is a relative paucity of attention to the intersection of religion and socioeconomic structure in the recent historiography of colonial Maryland. Her approach is original in two respects; her primary focus is on women, and she emphasizes the distinction between categories of persons she designates as Free Will Christians and Predestinarians. The former group includes Catholics, Quakers, and mainstream members of the Church of England, whom Meyers consistently, and annoyingly, refers to as Arminian Anglicans. The latter consists of Puritans (not Puritan Anglicans, thereby rendering the other designation especially problematic), Presbyterians, and other Calvinists. After an extensive analysis of wills, other court records, and popular devotional and theological treatises, Meyers arrives at two principal conclusions. First, she argues, “Free Will Christians … shared a fundamental view of salvation that tended to unify them more often than their professed differences divided them” (p. 180). And, second, the “essential theological bifurcation” between them and Predestinarians