:Oeuvres completes: Sonnets-Elegies, Debat de folie et d'amour

Abstract

M. P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641, Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 340, hb. £19.95, ISBN: 0691089434The controversial views of Anne Hutchinson and the manner in which the Massachusetts Bay authorities dealt with her were widely debated by religious polemicists on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1640s, and have become a staple subject for colonial historians ever since. Like Salem Witchcraft in 1692, the 'Antinomian Controversy' is a topic many would suspect has been totally exhausted. But Michael Winship of the University of Georgia has produced a brilliant study that should totally redefine the way in which the events swirling around Anne Hutchinson are understood.Winship is one of the handful of American colonialists who are well versed in the theological and social nuances of Tudor-Stuart English religion, and much of the sophistication of Making Heretics derives from his ability to draw connections between English developments and the evolution of New England society. He is aware of the many nuances of faith that existed within what has often been depicted as a homogenous puritan community, and the mechanisms used to maintain unity in the absence of uniformity. Cohesion required 'compromise and tacit restraint' (p. 10), and was destroyed when some placed the need for purity over the value of unity. Peter Lake and David Como have explored the consequences of such a breakdown in the London puritan community in the 1620s, and Winship draws upon their findings in his exploration of the religious scene in New England in the mid-1630s.Winship rejects the traditional labels of 'Antinomian Controversy' and 'Hutchinsonian Controversy', both of which make the dispute seem more straightforward than it was. He places at centre stage the ongoing debate among puritans on both side of the Atlantic over how assurance of grace was to be achieved and makes clear that in both England and New England there was no 'clearly defined, reliable orthodox path of assurance', but rather 'an assemblage of not entirely consistent techniques, doctrinal emphases, and affects' (p. 25). John Cotton, who joined the ministry of the Boston, Massachusetts church in 1633, though accused of Arminianism at one stage of his English career, had developed an understanding of assurance that emphasized the 'Holy Spirit's witnessing to a unilateral and absolute divine promise of salvation' (p. 33). Anne Hutchinson, who had been moved by Cotton's preaching in Lincolnshire and followed him to the New World, held similar views, as did other members of the Boston congregation. Yet that church also contained members who relied on evidences of sanctification to assure them that they had received God's free grace. By exercising the judgment of charity towards those with whom they disagreed the congregation maintained its unity in the search for further truth.Winship suggests that the growing episcopal pressure on English puritans in the 1620s and 1630s helped to maintain the unity of the diverse members of that community. In the New World, where the machinery of government was in the hands of the saints, some came to expect and demand greater purity and more complete uniformity. Winship argues that a decisive event in the shaping of the free grace controversy was the arrival of Thomas Shepard in the colony. …