New England, Nonesuch

Abstract

In 1652, Roger Williams published a book titled The Hireling Ministry None of Christs in London in which he made a theological argument with political implications for the settlement of the New World. “Nations being meerly and essentially civill,” Williams wrote, “cannot (Christianly) be called Christian States, after the patterne of that holy and typical Land of Canaan.” Nations should not think of themselves as “Christian,” that is to say, as favored by God, because, Williams said, the biblical Israel was “a Non-such and an unparalel’d Figure of the Spirituall State of the Church of Christ Jesus, dispersed, yet gathered to him in all Nations” (3). England and its colonies were no second Israel, no exceptions on earth, and no favored nation of God, because there was no parallel for a state’s protection in the New Testament. Members of a nation who made such a claim—much less acted on it—were, as Williams saw it, asking for trouble. The argument was directed at a London audience; Williams was barred from the Puritan-controlled press in the Massachusetts Bay colony, in part for holding ideas such as this one. London, however, was also a center of power that could override colonial controversies and that badly needed spiritual guidance in a time of social upheaval. Williams’s argument depends on close attention to the material conditions of representation. Like many university-trained Protestants of his day, he considered attentiveness to the Bible and a sense of its early linguistic and material history essential to making scriptural interpretations. Like other colonial subjects, he had to assess the marketplace for political controversy to make an effective argument from tiny, distant Providence Plantations. Because Williams positions it at the nexus of material textual histories and a critique of ideas about national entitlement, the notion of the nonesuch seems historiographically fertile. Its most familiar association for today’s readers might be “The Royal Nonesuch”: