Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641

Abstract

Michael P. Winship is fast becoming one of the most productive scholars working on the history of colonial New England religion and culture. With this second major monograph, he further establishes his penchant for close textual study, his revisionist impulse, his focus on the larger Atlantic community, and his disarming honesty about the complexity of the historical process. The result is a highly instructive reexamination of what is standardly known as the Antinomian controversy in early Massachusetts. That significant dispute he prefers to call “the free grace controversy.” No one who has written on the so-called Antinomian episode escapes unscathed from Winship's criticism. What sets his account apart from earlier studies is the breadth of his research dealing with what he calls “the greatest internal dispute of pre–Civil War puritanism, either in England or New England.” His rereading of this pivotal controversy is not confined to the American scene. Winship's study assumes a definition of “puritanism” as an imprecise category of insult equated loosely with the excessive Protestant, the zealously godly, or the “hot Protestant” (that last description is typical of Winship's bent toward vernacular expressions).