Antinomian Controversy Research Articles

Соотношение Закона и Евангелия в системе социально-этических воззрений общины польских братьев

This paper explores the issue of correlation between the Law and the Gospel in the controversy of Polish brethren on social-ethical topics. The debating sides built their argumentation on varying understanding of the Holy Scripture texts in the forming of moral codex of “the proper Christians”. The radical side was determined that the proper Christian cannot be a part of peccable social order, based on the violent standards of Old Testament’s Law (Dekalog). The other, conservative one, believed that the Old Testament’s Law was not canceled by the Gospel, but was conversely fulfilled and explained by the Christ. Therefore, the proper Christian does have place in the actual social life, and also can be a magistrate, judge or soldier. The polemic between Polish brethren is based on intellectual heritage of West-European Reformation. It was inspired by the reception of anabaptism and its theological doctrine of non-resistance and “isolation from evil”. The religious arguments of the sides may be considered as a repercussion of antinomian controversy (at one time initiated by German reformers Ph. Melanchthon and J. Agricola).

National Hawthorne in the College Classroom: Contexts, Materials, and Approaches, by Diller, Christopher, and Samuel Coale, editors.

<i>National Hawthorne in the College Classroom: Contexts, Materials, and Approaches</i>, by Diller, Christopher, and Samuel Coale, editors.

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Disgusting Affects from the Antinomian Controversy to the Antiabortion Movement

AbstractFocusing on disgust opens up critical paths that involve more expansive scopes of space and time than are possible with strictly historicist approaches to Puritan studies. This essay investigates the remarkably similar tactics for inducing disgust in narratives from the 1640s of the antinomians’ monstrous births and in the US Senate floor debate of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act just before the Iraq War in 2003. In both instances, rhetoric comparing familiar bodies to unfamiliar corporeal forms conjures powerful feelings of disgust that legitimize intervention. These powerful affective tactics help identify “rogues” to be eradicated—either colonial rogues, a “rogue procedure,” or a “rogue state”—hardening the border-focused feelings of disgust into hegemonic control. The essay concludes by taking a cue from the Puritans about embracing the inevitability of encountering disgusting feelings alongside wondrous ones, as well as inspiration from testimonies of abortion providers in the years immediately following Roe v. Wade, and arguing that critical attention to disgust enables the possibility of imagining a multiplicity of responses to different forms of embodiment.

The Problem of Toleration in Early Massachusetts

Early Massachusetts is generally seen by scholars as “intolerant.” But this is to employ a misleading dichotomy between tolerant and intolerant societies which obscures the colonists’ understanding of themselves. They believed that their society instead successfully reconciled individual liberty and communal harmony through rational debate, social consensus, and the pursuit of truth. Their response to the Antinomian controversy is highly revealing in this context, demonstrating that they desired to persuade the aberrant back into the fold and that they reserved political intervention for when dissension had serious public implications. It was only those deemed irreconcilable who were ultimately excluded from the community. To approach the topic in this way is to resist the marginalisation of New England from the history of political and social thought by re‐evaluating the ends and actions of the colonists and by providing an important alternative perspective on the nature of toleration and its limits.

The Governor’s Two Bodies: Polity and Monstrosity in Winthrop’s Boston

The Governor’s Two BodiesPolity and Monstrosity in Winthrop’s Boston Jonathan Beecher Field (bio) Scholars of early New England are surprisingly indifferent to monsters. To a contemporary reader, John Winthrop’s allegations that Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson gave birth to monsters are one of the more puzzling aspects of the Antinomian Controversy. Even though this theological and political struggle remains a perennial subject of inquiry for early Americanists, little of this attention has focused on the stories of Dyer’s and Hutchinson’s monstrous births.1 In spite of many disparate scholarly approaches to the Antinomian Controversy, almost without exception this body of scholarship downplays the accounts of monstrous births Massachusetts governor John Winthrop includes in his narratives of the Bay Colony’s struggle with Antinomians. Indeed, some earlier editions of John Winthrop’s Journal either omit the description of Hutchinson’s monstrous birth entirely or translate the more scandalous parts into Latin.2 Scholarship that does consider these monstrous births often focuses on scientific explanations for these phenomena in place of the God’s judgement explanation that Winthrop employs. Instead of beginning with a narrative of monstrosity, and working to explain the inexplicable in scientific terms, this essay proposes to read Winthrop’s account of monstrous births in terms of the tension between the disabled bodies that Winthrop attributes to Hutchinson and Dyer and the idealized able body Winthrop imagines as the form of his Bible commonwealth in “A Modell of Christian Charitie.” Intellectual history has dominated scholarship on early New England, and scholars in this field do not generally think much about Puritan bodies. Adding a bodily component to this history of ideas can offer new perspectives on familiar texts. In particular, the burgeoning field of disability studies suggests new connections between Winthrop’s “Modell” and his narratives of monstrous births. Winthrop’s discourse, composed around the 1630 voyage of the Arbella from England to New England, articulates [End Page 29] Winthrop’s vision for his Bible commonwealth through the image of the settlers as a single perfect body, united in perfect form through the ligaments of God’s love. Considering Winthrop’s “Modell” from the perspective of disability studies clarifies the Bay Colony governor’s investment in the able body as the figure of his Christian commonwealth. This canonical text of early American literature anticipates what Tobin Siebers has called the “ideology of ability,” where “we imagine our bodies are of no consequence while dreaming at the same time that we might perfect them” (9). For Siebers, this contradiction is central to contemporary imaginations of disability, which exist under “the shadow of the ideology of ability” (9). Siebers speaks to a contemporary moment in his scholarship, and importing this concept wholesale to seventeenth-century discourse runs the risk of anachronism, but the structures of thought he details resonate with the able and disabled bodies Winthrop conjures. In particular, “the ideology of ability simultaneously banishes disability and turns it into a principle of exclusion” (10). Winthrop’s image of a perfect society as a perfect body raises the question of how this perfect society would understand its members with imperfect bodies. As we will see, Hutchinson and Dyer’s monstrous births are of a piece with their putative inability to reproduce, their inability to read Scripture, and their banishment. For Winthrop, the imperfect bodies Hutchinson and Dyer produce are evidence of their heresy, and a mark of their separation from the godly community of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In turn, this contrast between Winthrop’s perfectly embodied Christian commonwealth and the monstrous spawn of his enemies offers a new, and more persuasive, explanation for the monstrous births. Miscarriages are real, but monsters are not. Turning one into the other is a product of Winthrop’s imagination. The Massachusetts Bay Colony as one ideal Christian body is an image that Winthrop produces in his writing; the monstrous births are another. If there is a material basis for the monstrous birth narratives in miscarriages Hutchinson and Dyer suffered, neither Winthrop’s monsters nor his perfect body have or ever had a physical, embodied reality. If we read the monstrous births as a move Winthrop makes in a...

Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Puritan Sympathy Chapter 2: Love of the Brethren and the Antinomian Controversy Chapter 3: Sympathy, Persuasion, and Seduction Chapter 4: Transatlantic Relations and the Rhetoric of Sympathy Chapter 5: Sympathy, Sincerity, and Sentimental Technique Chapter 6: Bewildered Sympathy Conclusion: Transformation and Continuity at the End of the Century Notes Index

You Don't Have to Go Home, but You Can't Stay Here

could not have been unknown to them” (p. 113). In her final chapter, “Deer Island and the Banishment of Indians,” Goodman continues to trace this paradox between Puritan laws and lawmaking. The removal of Native Americans to Deer Island during King Philip’s War 387 BAILEY / You Don’t Have to Go Home, but You Can’t Stay Here sees Puritans banishing a group of people from their jurisdiction while moving them to a body of land within their jurisdiction, effecting “a banishment that was unlike any other” (p. 117). Of course, the relationship of Native Americans to English law—be it royal law, equity law, canon law or common law—was decidedly different than that of any of the book’s earlier examples. But the Indians’ banishment changes that relationship. “Indeed,” asserts Goodman, “through their banishment to Deer Island the Indians gained recognition for the first time as persons within the terms of the English common law” (p. 119). Thus, the removal to Deer Island allowed Native Americans into the world of the Puritans in a way that not even conversion to Puritanism had done. By assigning Indians a specific home, New Englanders made certain they were not a part of their own English community. Goodman then wraps up her treatment of banishment by focusing briefly on the intersections of common law and the rhetoric of social exclusion in North America in the years following the Puritans, keeping her attention on the nonreligious grounds and justifications for the various evolutionary forms of banishment. Goodman’s study certainly contributes greatly to the ways in which scholars of history, literature, and religion ought both to think about and to approach the subject of banishment in colonial New England. Her reliance on and use of the theories of authors such as Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Edward Said, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Lacan, Clifford Geertz, David Delaney, and Giorgio Agamben among others, effectively links Banished and its subject to a much larger body of scholarship. Goodman, though, does not only rely on such theoretical scholars. She also makes able use of historians such as Anne Marie Plane, Jean O’Brien, Michael Zuckerman, and John Demos in making her appeal for a focus on the legal conceptions of banishment. One wonders, though, how some more recent historical works might have tempered even further her move away from the religious conceptions of such punishments. Though they both likely became available much too late in the writing process, one wonders how John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (2012) and Linford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (2012) might interact with Goodman’s conclusions about Roger Williams and his concerns for the proper relationship between church and state; or about the ways in which Native Americans potentially used their newfound Puritanism, or at least Christianity, to fashion a place for themselves in English society. On a more substantial level, recent scholarship by Michael Winship certainly provides an alternative reading of sorts to questions of banishment in early New England. Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (2002) stresses the connections between the religious, the political, and the legal in the “antinomian controversy,” though little is made of hospitality as the linchpin of the event and the subsequent penalty REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / SEPTEMBER 2013 388 suffered by Hutchinson. This is not to say that Goodman is incorrect, but one wonders how she does not at least interact briefly with the contentions of Winship’s important study. If any one volume kept coming to mind all the way through my reading of Banished, though, it was Adrian Chastain Weimer’s Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (2011). In general, Weimer deals with the same period of time in early New England. With the exception of Thomas Morton, she also deals with many of the same historical subjects. Weimer, however, connects their martyrdom and their respective formations of colonial identities primarily to religious concerns and the quest for personal holiness. The shared heritage of martyrdom helped shape early New England as their home. In the end, I do not know that any of these volumes necessarily preclude the importance of the legal aspects on which Goodman concentrates, but they certainly complicate the dialogue such legal conceptions had with other primarily religious conceptions. Read alongside this body of literature, Nan Goodman’s much-needed legal study paints a clearer portrait of Puritan communities in early New England, which was home to a remarkably diverse group of peoples—whether they all liked it or not. Richard A. Bailey is an associate professor at Canisius College and the author of Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (2011).

Florens in Salem

Florens in Salem Kristina Bross (bio) Reading A Mercy in an undergraduate class focused on seventeenth-century magical belief made for an alchemical experience. When I have taught the book in other kinds of courses, students took Florens's belief in the supernatural, particularly her reports of signs and omens, as idiosyncratic, expressions of a particular ignorant or wounded character within a culture like our own, built on a rational understanding of the world. Placing Morrison's work next to wonder tales and witchcraft [End Page 183] trials, however, we experienced a kind of sympathetic vibration in which both the novel and its historical antecedents seem sharper and more resonant. I used the novel as a capstone text for students in an upper-level undergraduate course I entitled "Witchcraft and Wonder in Early American Literature," a course that surveyed three moments of wonder or magic in colonial New England: the Antinomian controversy, the Salem witchcraft outbreak, and the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic. Among the students' assignments was a response paper discussing how the history of witchcraft in America is used in Morrison's novel.4 My aim was simple: to find out which elements of our historical study had stayed with them, and by applying that historical study to a contemporary work, to prompt them to see the ways that their study of the past could be used in criticism of contemporary events and culture. Having read of monstrous births, babies with scales and horns who were the direct reflection of the mother's heresies; of witchy descriptions of ghostly, glowing jellyfish laid out on a fireplace mantle; of animals and children struck down by a look, my students were primed to read all kinds of wonders as possible within Morrison's historical-fictional universe, set as it is in the years leading up to the Salem witchcraft trials. They approached A Mercy with a suspension of disbelief in which a kettle's steam really can shape itself into a dog's head omen, men's spirits actually do rise from their graves, and young girls are bewitched by strange men. Returning to the historic materials after reading the novel, they took from Morrison a sense of the poignancy of the situation in Salem in 1692. Reading historical accounts of wonder caused them to suspend disbelief as they read of Florens's magical signs or Rebekka's ghosts. Moreover, after reading Morrison, they seemed to find it easier to see how the seventeenth-century belief in an enchanted universe permeated all who were involved, that accusations of witchcraft were not (always) in bad faith, even if the results were scandalous, and that scapegoating is never a simple or straightforward evil. For this short essay, I want to focus on the reading we constructed together of chapter 7, one of Florens's chapters, in which Florens journeys into the wilderness in search of her blacksmith lover, finds a night's refuge in the house of Widow Ealing and her daughter Jane, and becomes the focus of a witch hunt. Florens's journey takes place in 1690, just two years before the Salem witchcraft trials began. My students noticed immediately [End Page 184] details that had not struck me as significant in my earlier readings. For instance, the chapter opens with Florens's portentous dream of "cherry trees walking toward me. . . . One bends down and I wake with a little scream in my mouth" (101). We knew from our reading of David Hall's Worlds of Wonder that such dreams were often taken as supernatural signs in the seventeenth century. Florens wakes to realize that "nothing is different," but my students nonetheless read the wild landscape as haunted: a clearing "remember[s] the burning of itself " (102). The air is filled with "bird talk"—which my students thought resonated with Salem accounts of familiars in the shape of little yellow birds. Even her encounter with flesh-and-blood people, young Native men who give her food and water, partakes of the magical: "I blink and they all disappear" (103). Soon after, Florens leaves the haunted landscape of the wilderness and lands in a proto-Salem village, just two years before the historic...

Introduction: Women Writing Disability

We were told of disabilities, -- a long array of these, Till one would think that womanhood was merely a disease; And maternal sacrifice was added to the plan Of the various sacrifices we have always made--to man. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women Do Not Want It DISABILITY, INTERSECTIONS, AESTHETICS Rosemarie Garland Thomson observes, Many parallels exist between the social meanings attributed to female and those assigned to disabled bodies (19). In this regard it would be hard to imagine early-twentieth-century psychoanalysis without so-called women's diseases like hysteria or neurasthenia. Female sexuality and reproduction have, historically, been monitored by male-dominated medical and psychoanalytic professions. Fashion, building design, and juridical definitions of identity have reinforced the idea that, as Iris Marion Young says, in sexist society are physically handicapped (qtd. in Wendell 15). Concepts of aesthetic perfection and beauty are often figured around idealized (often naked) female despite their armless (Venus de Milo) and headless (le Victoire de Samothrace) forms. Much Western literature is constructed around the volatile of the Medusa, the madwoman in the attic, and the consumptive heroine. Feminist and queer theory have been at the forefront in recognizing how gender and sexual difference have been articulated through the nontraditional, excessive, or abnormal body, making gender and sexuality visible by positing an idealized norm of physical and mental perfection. This special issue of Legacy features scholarship on American women writers from the antebellum period to the 1930s. Essays in the volume foreground issues of race, illness, cognitive disability, deafness, blindness, mobility, deuendency, and the related reform movements in which women were often activists. Despite our focus on more modern periods, we can see the intersection of disability and gender in the inaugural formations of US literature. Anne Bradstreet, speaking of her anxiety over the publication of her 1650 book, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, compared what she saw as her flawed poems with an unruly, crippled child: I wash'd thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw, I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run'st more hobling than is meet. (The Author to Her Book 13-16) Bradstreet's comparison of her uneven meters to the limping gait of a child instantiates a feeling among many early settlers that a woman who writes violates her proper maternal role and thus produces a defective child.' Bradstreet's deployment of what Wendy Martin calls subversive piety expresses a woman's darker anxiety about agency in a frontier environment, an anxiety expressed through male fears of uncontainable sexuality or demonic possession. Female biology often becomes the site for fears of contamination, both national and theological. Cotton Mather's account of the Salem witchcraft trials is filled with references to the physical disabilities resulting from contact with women heretics and freethinkers. In his history of the antinomian controversy, John Winthrop remarks on one of the heretics interrogated by the synod of 1637, Mistris Dier forth her birth of a woman child, a fish, a beast, and a fowle, all woven together in one, and without an head. He then describes Anne Hutchinson, who similarly brought forth not one ... but ... 30. monstrous births or thereabouts, at once; some of them bigger, some lesser, some of one shape, some of another; few of any perfect shape, none at all of them (as farre as I could ever learne) of humane shape (214). If Native people and a hostile climate were external threats to settlement, women often provided an internal threat to the community of saints. A later antinomian, Emily Dickinson, rearticulated these fears of female agency and biology by rhetorically cross-dressing as male and in the process undergoing a disabling physical transformation: Rearrange a Wife's Affection! …

David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New EnglandWays of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. David D. Hall. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 248.

<i>David D. Hall</i>, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England<i>Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England</i>. David D. Hall. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 248.

Antinomian Controversy in the Seventeenth-Century New England and the First Great Awakening---Focused on Jonathan Edwards' Doctrine of Justification

Antinomian Controversy in the Seventeenth-Century New England and the First Great Awakening---Focused on Jonathan Edwards' Doctrine of Justification

Martyrs' mirror: persecution and holiness in early New England

Introduction: The Pure Persecuted Church Chapter One: Martyrs and their Books Chapter Two: The Lineage of Separatist Suffering Chapter Three: Performances of Martyrdom in the Antinomian Controversy Chapter Four: Baptists and the Identity of Persecution Chapter Five: Quaker Suffering Chapter Six: Devilish Enemies of Religion in King Philip's War Conclusion: Pain, Power, and the Martyr Ideal

Privacy and Prurience: An Essay on American Law, Religion, and Women

In my studying of American law – in its relation to religion and to privacy and to women – the current bookends of my readings consist of two sets of texts: the first, certain writings from the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony; the second, certain writings from the United States Supreme Court of very recent years. The first set consists of reports and records generated in Massachusetts incident to the Antinomian Controversy of 1836-1838, particularly reports of the trials of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, and accounts of the “monstrous births” of each. The second set includes writings from year 2007: the United States Supreme Court’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart (its most recent abortion decision), and the amicus briefs filed therein.Examining and juxtaposing those sets of writings, this essay discloses striking resonances between the 17th-century and the 21st-century texts. It documents in each: religio-judicial prurience in examinations and constructions of female bodies; and disappearance of “privacy” as a protector of women’s autonomy and women’s liberty.

Richard Holdsworth and the Antinomian Controversy

Richard Holdsworth and the Antinomian Controversy

“So Manifest a Signe from Heaven”: Monstrosity and Heresy in the Antinomian Controversy

Several months after being banished from Massachusetts Bay for her antinomian beliefs, Anne Hutchinson miscarried. Heralding it as a sign from God, authorities insisted that Hutchinson's “monstrous birth” was indisputable proof of her monstrous views, evidence that inspired fear and awe and would undoubtedly return the wayward to orthdoxy's fold.

Review

Reviewed by: Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 Anne G. Myles Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700. By Tamara Harvey. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. x + 163pp. $99.95. The title of this book initially seems paradoxical, as the terms "modesty" and "feminist discourse" may initially appear to be at odds, charges of immodesty or unchastity being one of the most familiar tactics used to silence and invalidate female public expression. Tamara Harvey quickly complicates this assumption, however, by reminding us that two different Latin terms underlie the concept of modesty: pudor, the typical modesty of women, connected to notions of weakness, limitation, and the need for feminine concealment, and modestus, defined as "to 'keep due measure,'" a term generally associated with men but not intrinsically gendered (1). Harvey contends that the four women she studies—Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson in New England, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico, and Marie de l'Incarnation in Quebec—deploy this second concept of modesty in their writings and use it both to engage a wide range of discourses familiar to the authors and to challenge the misogynist claims within them. To do so, they stress a particular idea of the body, which Harvey designates as "feminist functionalism": Bodies are seen as necessary or effective in various ways, rather than as symbolically important (3). This "functionalism" provides a subtle but profound conceptual shift: A symbolic view of the body underlies patriarchal ideas of the female body as flawed, a "deprived [form] of male perfection," and hence becomes the basis for what Alice Jardine calls gynesis, a tactic through which, in the seventeenth-century colonial context, "female otherness is used to constitute male subjectivity and privilege, define the intersection between theology and social order, and shape transatlantic politics" (3, 5). By contrast, a functionalist understanding of the body allows these women to critique gynesis and the arguments for female subordination founded upon it. Moreover, functionalism allows women to challenge body/spirit dualism and to cultivate ideas of "discipline, practice, and embodied efforts that are always conditioned by the limits of [End Page 280] human perception in a fallen world"—in other words, to embrace a modest and ultimately community-centered vision of knowledge and action (2). The women whose lives and works are explored in Figuring Modesty fall into two pairs, although this design becomes fully explicit only in the conclusion. Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana, the first two figures studied, are poets; the second pair, Anne Hutchinson and Marie de l'Incarnation, are religious activists, a distinction Harvey argues is more useful than the contrast between Puritan goodwives and Catholic nuns. Harvey's examination in the first two chapters is focused on scrupulous close readings of signal works—Bradstreet's quaternions and Sor Juana's Primero Sueño—in the context of the medical and religious discourses with which these philosophical poems are engaged. Harvey claims that the most interesting "feminist gestures" of these writers "are evident not in their language or tactics of individual self-empowerment but in their engagement of new ideas in ways that both refuse and render irrational gynetic tropes" (142). The texts examined in the latter two chapters are more wide ranging, as the debates the women are engaged in are situated in the historical contexts of the Antinomian Controversy and the Ursuline apostolate. These women are "concerned with ways of knowing God's will situated within community." For "both, this is manifested as a concern for how the body testifies to God's will in its functions and not as a sign to be read from the outside" (143). This connection between functionalism and community is among the book's most intriguing dimensions. It connects to another underlying contention—that even feminist scholars' accounts of these women do not do them justice because they regard them as isolated from intellectual traditions or implicitly individualist in their motivations. This overview of the study's key ideas does not capture its scholarly texture, as it is impossible to do justice in a short review to Harvey's detailed explorations of texts that were originally written in three languages. Although...

The Antinomian Controversy Did Not Take Place

The Antinomian Controversy that has preoccupied generations of early Americanists did not occur as a theological crisis in Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s. Instead, its status as a distinctive crisis in the history of early New England is an artifact of debates between apologists for the New England Way and Presbyterian heresiographers in the 1640s. Reading these texts of this debate in conjunction with John Winthrop’s journal and the far more benign account John Clarke offers in Ill Newes from New England (1652) reveals that it is trans-Atlantic print exchanges between Presbyterians and Independents that impose the familiar structure of the Antinomian Controversy as a singular crisis with Anne Hutchinson at its center. Despite their ideological differences, Independent and Presbyterian polemicists colluded to produce a narrative of these events that exaggerated their exceptional nature. With few exceptions, the frame this religious debate imposed on the events of the 1630s has dictated the terms of subsequent historical debates of these events, from Cotton Mather to the present.

From the Editor

From the Editor Elaine Forman Crane This issue of Early American Studies offers a range of articles that have unusual connections. For those absorbed by the complex issues involving cultural change and exchange, essays about New England and the Caribbean will command attention. Andrea Cremer and James Robertson focus on the ways colonial cultures seek to impose change and, in turn, are changed by competing powers. Michael Mulcahy links the Port Royal earthquake to changes in intellectual interpretations of natural phenomena and because both Robertson and Mulcahy concentrate on Jamaica, their essays flow together nicely. Three other articles concentrate on words, albeit in different ways: words that imbue power, words that instill national loyalty, and words that create events. Antonio Bly offers evidence of a greater number of literate runaways than we have previously conceived, Neil York explores the perpetuation of patriotism through Johnny Tremain, and Jonathan Beecher Field examines the historiographical construction of the Antinomian controversy. This issue welcomes a new department, “Lecture Notes.” Designed for authors who do not plan further revision or expansion of conference papers, this occasional department will publish presentations that concern subjects of limited or immediate interest rather than those requiring long-term research. The essays will be printed as the audience heard them: without footnotes. Michael Zuckerman’s piece on the politics of then and now fits the parameters of this new department quite nicely. Finally, the second half of the diary of Horace Lee appears in this issue, covering the year between July 1841 and July 1842. Patrick Farmer reintroduces Lee to us, and we only wish that somewhere, sometime, someone will find—in a dusty New England attic—the missing journal that precedes the one written by this charming young man. But whether the earlier volume emerges or not, the selections published in Early American Studies must take their place alongside the most delightful of New England diaries. Fall 2008 [End Page v] Copyright © 2008 The McNeil Center for Early American Studies

REASSESSING THE RADICALS

The precisianist strain: disciplinary religion and antinomian backlash in puritanism to 1638. By Theodore Dwight Bozeman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xv+349. ISBN 0-8078-2850-5. $49.95.Making heretics: militant Protestantism and free grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641. By Michael P. Winship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. xv+322. ISBN 0-691-08943-4. $33.95.Blown by the spirit: puritanism and the emergence of an antinomian underground in pre-civil-war England. By David R. Como. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. ix+513. ISBN 0-8047-4443-2. $70.00.The English radical imagination: culture, religion, and revolution, 1630–1660. By Nicholas McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. 219. ISBN 0-19-926051-6. £49.00.There has only been one historical monograph on the English antinomians and that was published in 1951. They are long overdue for reassessment. Fortunately, that task is well underway. Taken together, three recent books – cumulatively amounting to well over one thousand pages of text – advance our understanding in substantial and significant ways. Of course, the antinomians have not been absent from the historiography over the last five decades. Their involvement in the ‘antinomian controversy’ that wracked the early New England colony during the mid-1630s has been well-worked ground, whilst they are much too colourful a feature of the mid-seventeenth-century English ferment and upheaval to be overlooked. But they have, more often than not, been background figures, tangential characters in a bigger story. By contrast, in these works, they are in the foreground, with an elaborate and illuminating background within which to understand them in fresh and important ways. The result is a welcome reappraisal that is helpful, insightful, and comprehensive.