Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Research Articles

:Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England

:<i>Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England</i>

That Early New England, This Early New England, and Some of the Next

That Early New England, This Early New England, and Some of the Next Michael Ditmore (bio) As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon daniel t. rodgers Princeton University Press, 2018 356 pp. City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism abram c. van engen Yale University Press, 2020 380 pp. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History david d. hall Princeton University Press, 2019 518 pp. Poems and Meditations anne bradstreet, ed. margaret olofson thickstun Iter Press and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2019 380 pp. The Virtuous and Violent Women of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts emily c. k. romeo University of Massachusetts Press, 2020 220 pp. Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England elisabeth ceppi Dartmouth University Press, 2018 276 pp. [End Page 237] There are some inexterminables we tolerate as best we can: death, taxes, nuclear bomb-proof cockroaches, and New England Puritanism. Of this quartet, the last strikes me as the most historically contingent and least natural. New England Puritans are difficult to get rid of, no matter how unpalatable many may find them, and whether one is sympathetic, antagonistic, or somehow agnostic. But from whatever angle, they are always contenders for sustained and renewed attention. Consider: under travailing circumstances of 2020, "America's Hometown"—Plymouth—did its level best, masked and distanced, to celebrate the quadricentenary of that first deadly winter of the Mayflower's arrival, and in ways that equitably honor and dignify its pre- and post-Mayflower heritages.1 And if Plymouth celebrates, can Boston and all the rest of New England be far behind? Will we see, as in the bicentennials of the 1830s and again in the tricentennials of the 1930s, an unfolding series of town celebrations, monuments, studies, commemorative knickknacks, and such across New England? Surely so; but just as surely, we will also see unprecedented strains and tensions; the throwback costumes, recipes, and recitations are likely to seem worse than dated. One thinks of that cracked and bowed main beam of the Mayflower, mid-Atlantic: how many would now bother with its repair? Who possesses the equipment, skills, or motivation for the task? This present selection of books, for all the divergent angles and aspects, affords but one somewhat prismatic, dispersed glimpse into the present states of New England Puritanism academically calibrated, and perhaps will offer some foretaste of what to expect as we approach 2030 and beyond. They are all, to be sure, state of the art, but they hardly represent all the scholarly activity at present or to come; however, they do provide a worthwhile vantage point for surveying something of—well, I wouldn't push the Plymouth allusions too far, but let's say a Mount Pisgah. I have divided them into three pairings: measured deflations of a classic sermon; the Puritans as they were; and forms of oppression. Without intending to, I found that pairings in each case settled in a literature-history dyad, suggesting that, despite our disciplinary overlap, we still have miles to go before such boundaries dissolve. First and foremost, as a foundational homage for Boston's quadricentenary we would expect a full-dress rehearsal of Governor John Winthrop's profound and indispensable 1630 lay sermon on the Arbella as it crossed the Atlantic, "A Model of Christian Charity," laying groundwork [End Page 238] and spearheading the Great Migration into Massachusetts Bay and all that dominoed and degenerated therefrom. We certainly would, except that virtually every detail of the preceding sentence has been severely scrutinized and found wanting over the past thirty years, to the point that even its authorship is now disputed.2 That can make for an especially embarrassing beginning, if every detail of one's ballyhooed origin has been pretty much obliterated. And that is deeply unfortunate, given the extraordinary investment put into the Model" by historians, politicians, and educators over the past sixty or so years. Up until the 2016 national election at least, it seemed that every national politician since Ronald Reagan routinely sampled the "Model"; generations of teachers and test-makers have found it especially useful for critiquing "American exceptionalism." But beginning...

Emily C. K. Romeo, The Virtuous and Violent Women of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

Emily C. K. Romeo, The Virtuous and Violent Women of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America by Kelly A. Ryan

Reviewed by: Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America by Kelly A. Ryan Anna Mae Duane (bio) Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America kelly a. ryan New York University Press, 2019 400 pp. When Abigail Adams asked her husband to "remember the ladies" as he drafted the laws for the new nation, John Adams scoffed, arguing that loosening the controls on one aspect of "our Masculine systems" threatened to set off a dangerous chain reaction. Already, he worried, there were reports that children and apprentices had grown disobedient, that schools had become turbulent, that Native Americans disrespected their guardians, and that enslaved people had grown rebellious. If even one group was to advance, Adams suggested, the shift in power would topple the order of society. In the years surrounding the American Revolution, a large part of the population was included in one of the legally disempowered groups that Adams describes, and it is this population that Kelly A. Ryan analyzes in Everyday Crimes: Social Violence and Civil Rights in Early America. As Ryan uncovers the multiple tactics people in these groups deployed in order to escape the violence that dominated their lives, the book chronicles how the sporadic and uneven advances made by one group sometimes emerged in competition against, but often came in tandem with, others who also sought to convince the public that the brutality they endured was unacceptable. Ryan has gathered a remarkable archive of legal records from New York and Massachusetts, supplemented by print literature, diaries, and letters of people seeking relief from abuse. Even as the geography of the study is largely circumscribed to New York and greater New England, the demographic scope of the inquiry itself is ambitiously diverse. Ryan draws from several different, but sometimes overlapping, categories of legally disempowered [End Page 580] people in this capacious study, including white wives, child servants and apprentices, and enslaved African Americans. As Ryan leads us through a harrowing archive of court cases and newspaper accounts, we learn the names of people like Katherine Naylor, a seventeenth-century Massachusetts wife who sought help to escape marital violence so severe it threatened her life (47). We are introduced to an enslaved eighteenth-century trio known only Mark, Phillip, and Phoebe, who conspired to kill their brutally cruel enslaver (77). We are confronted with the fate of a fourteen-year-old white servant boy named John Walker whose abuse at the hands of his employer did not merit any judicial notice until his beaten and frostbitten body scandalized the town (30). As extensive as Everyday Crimes's collected archive of cases is, Ryan readily admits its limitations. Not everyone suffering as Naylor, Phoebe, and Walker did sought outside help in ways that would become legible. People isolated in rural environments and people prevented by mental or physical disability from making powerful allies rarely appear in such records. Even as we read of the horrific violence visited on individuals like Katherine Naylor or Mark, Phillip or Phoebe, Everyday Crimes reminds us that there were thousands upon thousands whose situations were still more dire, and whose stories we will likely never know. Drawing from such a wide swath of the population is a bold and, arguably, a risky strategy. Scholars have often separated the study of enslaved people from the study of white women and children to avoid the possibility of diminishing the unique atrocities attributable to slavery by conflating it with other disempowered positions. As nineteenth-century authors including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs demonstrated, white women often deployed their (admittedly circumscribed) power to harm the enslaved people under their control. Ryan's own case studies indicate that white children were fully capable of doing the same. In one striking case Ryan documents, an enslaved man was pushed to retaliatory violence as his enslaver's young son mimicked his father's cruelty, taunting and hitting the enslaved man as he went about his work. In recent years, critics including Karen Sánchez Eppler, Martha Jones, and others have demonstrated how white women made metaphorical alliances with Black people for political advantage, while refusing to include Black women in the gains. While there...

“Jethro, Who Saved Taunton”: An African Man's Captivity Narrative during King Philip's War

This article examines the experiences of Jethro, an enslaved African man who was captured by the Narragansetts during King Philip's War. While captive, Jethro used his bilingualism to gather information about the Narragansett's war plans and then escaped and relayed them to the English. Jethro was granted freedom for this wartime service and went on to purchase property in the North End of Boston. He was representative of the charter generation of enslaved persons who showed that attitudes about race in seventeenth-century Massachusetts were still being formed. This essay further demonstrates how Jethro's story was appropriated by colonial writers at the time for their own unique purposes. Analyzing Jethro's story provides an opportunity to foreground Africanness in American captivity narratives.

Witch-Hunts and Crime Panics in America

The term witch-hunt has been tossed around by media commentators, policy experts, and even presidents for years — Nixon, Clinton, and Trump each in turn. Accusations of a witch-hunt are used to signal perceived bias, procedural unfairness, and paranoia. This Article argues that drawing simplistic connections between witchcraft trials and unfairness in the criminal justice system severely hampers our understanding of both historical and contemporary events. It obscures the fact that the term witch-hunt is popularly used to describe two very different types of prosecutions that reflect distinct social and legal problems and demand distinct solutions. On the one hand, witch-hunts target individuals based on their beliefs and are exemplified by the two Red Scares of the early and mid-twentieth century and the persecution of the Quakers in seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay. These are fundamentally distinct from crime panics, which target activity that was already classified as criminal but do so in a way that reveals deep procedural deficiencies in the criminal justice system. Crime panics are exemplified by the Salem witchcraft trials and the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, the ongoing special investigation by Robert Mueller is neither a witch-hunt nor a crime panic. By bringing ongoing criminal law issues into conversation with legal history scholarship on early American witch-hunts, this article clarifies our understanding of the relationship between politics and large-scale criminal investigations, and highlights areas for future reform.

Church, State, and Commonwealth: The Transatlantic Puritan Movement in England and America

Church, State, and Commonwealth:The Transatlantic Puritan Movement in England and America Neal T. Dugre Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds. By Francis J. Bremer. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012. 436 pages. Cloth. Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England. By Abram C. Van Engen. Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 325 pages. Cloth, ebook. Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill. By Michael P. Winship. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. 350 pages. Cloth. Like most puritan divines, the Reverend John Davenport spent a good deal of his adult life explaining the subtleties of his beliefs. These conversations were often informal, but some, including his Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design is Religion, found their way into print. Davenport wrote the Discourse around 1638 or 1639 in response to an unnamed correspondent who wondered "Whether the Right and Power of Chusing Civil Magistrates belongs unto the Church of Christ?"1 In the late 1630s, the answer to that question was of great interest to English audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Puritans in Massachusetts Bay had recently embraced their own brand of congregationalism and adopted a radical form of civil government that entangled ecclesiastical and civil polities by restricting the franchise to male church members, moves that attracted intense scrutiny in England. Over twenty-four pages, Davenport expounded on his views of civil polities and their relationship to the church. Yet before delving into his intricate, six-part argument, he critiqued the inquiry itself. The wording of the [End Page 344] question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. It assumed that ecclesiastical and civil polities together constituted the basic elements of society, but the real foundation was something else entirely: "Christian Communion." In Davenport's taxonomy, "Christian Communion" was the "Genus" of society, and ecclesiastical and civil polities its "Species."2 Although church and state each had different objectives, they shared the goal of promoting the common welfare, of nurturing Christian Communion. Perhaps we too have been asking the wrong questions. Twenty-five years ago, historian David D. Hall bemoaned how out of touch the "half-truths" scholars tell about puritanism in seventeenth-century New England were with recent scholarship.3 Despite a steady stream of monographs published in the intervening decades, historians and literary scholars still grapple with that disconnect. Both Abram C. Van Engen and Francis J. Bremer, for example, promote their studies in part as rebuttals to the tenacious half-truth of stern and unfeeling puritans. All three of the books under review advance a recent revival in puritan studies that is beginning to close this gap. Examining institutions, intangible feelings, and the lived experiences that knit puritans in England and America together, the authors take puritan theology and the intricate bonds between New England's ecclesiastical and civil polities seriously. In recovering the face-to-face interactions and dialogues between individuals from various points on the spectrum of puritan orthodoxy, the authors suggest how puritans moved toward the larger goal of fostering Christian Communion by negotiating relationships among themselves. In Godly Republicanism, Michael P. Winship returns to the beginnings of the puritan movement following the ascension of Queen Elizabeth I and the restoration of Protestantism to England. Described as a "study in applied sacred political theory" (4), the book examines the republican foundations of church and state in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Winship builds on recent English scholarship that locates the roots of republicanism not in the mid-seventeenth century but in Tudor and early Stuart England. Religion has not factored prominently in that historiography, but Winship brings to light "assumptions and webs of concern" (5) that linked puritanism to secular political ideals that we recognize as republicanism. Godly ecclesiastical republicanism and secular republicanism shared common "priorities and anxieties," namely "the dread of the corrupting effects of power, the fear of one-man rule, the emphasis on the consent of the people and on balanced government" (5). Throughout, Winship highlights the surprising and significant [End Page 345] ways that separatists, "black sheep" (7) among puritans and their historians, interacted with radical...

Cheryl C. Boots. Singing for Equality: Hymns in the American Antislavery and Indian Rights Movements, 1640–1855.

Seldom utilized effectively by today's interpreters, hymns and metrical psalms are fundamental sources for the history of American religious culture. These ritual texts and their paired tunes were ubiquitous in colonial and antebellum America, legitimating cultural institutions and practices while also holding the potential to inspire change. In this ambitious study, Cheryl C. Boots explores hymns as agents of change before the Civil War and their role in the struggle to achieve racial equality for African Americans and Native Americans. Boots begins her survey with John Eliot's efforts to share Puritan psalmody with his indigenous “praying towns” in seventeenth-century Massachusetts and ends with hymn texts in the abolition fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Wells Brown. Along the way she offers short treatments of hymns in the work of Samson Occom, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, Richard Allen, Jarena Lee, William Apess and Mary Apess, Lydia Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold Boudinot, Catherine Beecher, David Walker, Maria W. Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Maria Weston Chapman, and William Lloyd Garrison. She contrasts hymn use by these egalitarian writers with references to singing in white establishmentarian works like Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826). She also examines four important egalitarian hymnals, Occom's A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs: Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians of All Denominations (1774), Allen's The African Methodist Pocket Hymn Book (1816), the American Anti-Slavery Society's Freedom's Lyre (1840), and Brown's The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848).

Investigating Metacom's War: Analyzing Rowlandson's Primary Document in Upper-Elementary Classrooms

Metacom's War, also known as King Phillip's War, sets a pattern of national expansion through displacement of native people that echoes throughout American history. Helping students further understand this war through the examination of Mary Rowlandson's primary document provides educators and students with an opportunity to delve deeper into the complexities surrounding the convergence of cultures in colonial America. In this article, I provide an overview of the context that led to the conflict between the native populations and the European settlers. Additionally, I highlight passages from Rowlandson's narrative that are relevant to upper-elementary students. The passages are accompanied by questions to assist students as they examine the primary source for a deeper understanding of the people who strove to survive in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Examining primary sources is one piece of the multifaceted process of historical understanding. In this article, educators learn the historical content of the period and a structured process for their students to examine the primary source.

Butter, Milk, and a “Spare Ribb”: Women's Work and the Transatlantic Economic Transition in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

Exploring the generally unappreciated connection between local economic behavior and the emergence of larger commercial endeavors in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, the article demonstrates, through a close analysis of contemporary account books, that “women's work” was a vital element in the colony's pivotal transition to a transatlantic economy.

Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (review)

Reviewed by: Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Kristina Bross (bio) Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts. Amy M. E. Morris. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. 282 pp. In Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts, Amy M. E. Morris champions early New England poetry, not despite its derivation from plain-style sermons, its awkward syntax, its abjection before other genres, but rather because of these qualities. Morris variously terms the design of poetry by Bay Psalm translators Michael Wigglesworth and Edward Taylor as an "alternative" or "resistant" aesthetic (76, 207). And certainly, a quick glance at the Bay Psalm Book's rendering of Psalm 23 reveals it to be quite, ahem, "alternative": The Lord to me a shepherd is,Want therefore I shall not,He in the folds of tender grassDoth make me down to lie. Indeed, I once heard a presentation on the excellence of William Tyndale's English translation of the Bible that turned specifically on the contrast of his more elegant verse with that of the Bay Psalm Book. Such criticism of Puritan literary form is familiar, of course, maugre the work over the years of Michael Clark, Robert Daly, Norman Grabo, Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Jeffrey Hammond, William Scheick, Ivy Schweitzer, and others (all of whose work Morris references) to consider Puritan poetry and poetics on its own terms. While those familiar with the cadences of the Tyndalian or Authorized (King James) Bible continue to hear shortcomings, Morris hears real—albeit unusual—poetic strengths. Morris's point of departure is Perry Miller's still-influential analysis of [End Page 433] logic and rhetoric in New England culture. Despite the decades of scholarship on New England since Miller, Morris suggests, we are still left with the question of how the "humanistic and rational side of New England Puritanism" coexisted with "the zeal and pietism that even Miller acknowledged as also characteristic of the faith" (12). Morris admits this question is not original to her study; rather she offers "special consideration of the influence of ecclesiastical practice as well as theory on Puritan poetics." She is interested in how New England poets "created literary opportunities out of the problematic connotations of forms, conformity, and formality with which they were faced" (32). While the result is not a pathbreaking approach to Puritan poetry, it does result in interesting, provocative readings of important poets and poetry of seventeenth-century New England. Morris argues persuasively that colonial poets responded to the tenets of the New England Way by creating an "unconventional artfulness" (74), which enabled them to write verse—that most formal of literary expressions—that was a vehicle for spiritual meditation, but which did not overwhelm the emotions with elegant language. To do so would be to lead readers down a path of dead formalism. Instead, Morris argues, the aesthetic of early New England poets—jarring in plain-style diction or syntax, relying on the expansiveness of a "lolloping ballad form" (127) for even the most serious of topics, didactic yet not affective—these choices "suggested that God had to be sought through spiritual, as opposed to linguistic, or literary, exploration" (104). In other words, human preparation for salvation could only take one so far—it required God's will to effect conversion. The aesthetic choices of New England's poet-ministers were designed to remind readers that they could not live by verse alone. Theirs was, Morris argues, an aesthetic of "spiritual complementation" (126) in which, if grace is to be bestowed, it can only have divine origins. This "halfway" quality—and Morris connects the limitations of New England poetic form as a tool of conversion to the intentional doctrinal limitations of the Halfway Covenant—meant that the poetry of New England's writers had to embody a quality that it drew from and shared with other linguistic forms of church order and worship, a transparency that pointed the listener/reader away from the words to God Himself: "Like the rite of owning the covenant, the poem embodied in its own language the absolute need for an encounter that its own form and words could not...

The Career of Puritan Jurisprudence

Scholars have long asked to what extent there was a distinctive Puritan jurisprudence in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Purita n jurisprudenceis a shorthand that refers to those elements of seventeenth-century Massachusetts's laws and institutions designed or selected because of the early colony's religious commitments. Among the fundamentals of Puritan jurisprudence were the integrated and determined use of legal and ecclesiastical institutions to foster a godly community, the importance of the Bible as a touchstone for the legitimacy of rules, and a constitutional order restricting colony-wide voting and political office to regenerate members of covenanted churches. Some historians speak of “Puritan justice” or “Puritan legal culture” rather than “Puritan jurisprudence.” Differing in detail and emphasis, these formulations point to a core idea animating much writing about early Massachusetts: that the colony lived by a legal order distinctive by the standards of contemporary England and her North American and Caribbean colonies and strongly shaped by Puritan religious commitments and social thought.

Daughters of Eve: Pregnant Brides and Unwed Mothers in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

Daughters of Eve: Pregnant Brides and Unwed Mothers in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

New World, Known World: Shaping Knowledge in Early Anglo-American Writing; Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts; Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America

New World, Known World: Shaping Knowledge in Early Anglo-American Writing; Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts; Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America

The First Linguistic Turn

The First Linguistic Turn David Waldstreicher (bio) Jane Kamensky. Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xi + 291 pp. Tables and index. $35.00. In one of the most luminous passages in American historical writing, Richard Hofstadter described colonial America from the perspective of a seafaring man with a good sense of smell: It is now hard to imagine, but it is a matter of record that a mid-eighteenth century mariner approaching the American strand could detect the fragrance of the pine trees about 60 leagues, or 180 nautical miles, from land. Before landfall he might thus be reminded, even after more than a century of white settlement, of the essential newness of the New World. On landing he could hardly escape fresh remembrances: he could see the trees themselves, arrayed in such formidable ranks that they were attacked and felled in careless numbers by settlers eager to get at the untilled soil beneath; he could see beaver pelts and deerskins brought to market, tokens of a teeming animal life in the interior; he might hear about the fish, spawning in such numbers that the ease of catching them had become a legend and a joke. 1 Nature, markets, and men who can count: these are the facts of early America, worthy of a poetry of fragrance and vision. It is only after sniffing and seeing for himself that Hoftstadter’s mariner enters a world of discourse, hearing and talking about something below the surface. Sight and appetite rule over insight and language, so that even before setting his feet on the ground the representative American reveals less a sense of spirit, or any ideological commitment, than an eye and a nose for the main chance. With this protocol Hofstadter debunked the myths of origin that began with liberty or religious commitment in Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay. Yet while shifting the scene and the sense—from the New England mind to the Atlantic seaman’s nose and eyes—Hofstadter retained the perceiving, solitary man as the subject of history, and New World nature as the tableau for that man’s less theological than accumulative speculations. Jane Kamensky bespeaks a different myth of origins. Her ship is the Arabella, and the faculties at work are not eyes and noses, they are ears and [End Page 14] mouths. John Winthrop’s famous shipboard oration needs to be seen—or heard—in the context that produced it: the speech of the men and women on deck whose despairing remarks provided the occasion for an inspired talk and a written covenant. New England begins with a chorus of complaint, a welter of whimpers. Not silent smelling, or “fresh” Proustian memories of abundance, but a charged dialogue between leaders and followers—and between women and men. Of course Kamensky is too much a product of her time to insist on one beginning, and too dedicated to precision to insist on the need for typicality, much less a Plymouth Rock-like moment. Her interpretation of Winthrop and his fellow passengers is just one of many delightfully told examples in this innovative reworking of culture and communication in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. In addition to reanimating new and old debates in early New England studies, her outstanding book also testifies to the possibility of taking the linguistic turn without leaving readers awash in a sea of jargon. In this work—and we may hope, in future works of social and cultural history—a sensitivity to language in history complements the author’s sensitivity to language in the writing of history. The result is a powerful example of why the vaunted return to narrative, which among colonialists has emerged most prominently in examinations of individual experience and interiority, is not the only way of being attentive to stories and their power. 2 Stories, here, find their origins less in personal crises, the psychology of memory, domestic traumas, or small group dynamics than in the socially bound practices of everyday, public speech. Language, in public and private, is something we need to see rather than “see through” (p. 10). “You could have heard a pin drop in seventeenth century...

"Power" in Puritan Massachusetts

This a singular book. On one hand, it another installment in longrunning series, initiated by Perry Miller in 1930s, focused on Puritanism in America. Based in an extensive reading of New England's political development, from Cambridge Agreement of 1629, which granted charter for projected colony to planters themselves, to that document's revocation in 1684 as King Charles II contemplated a Dominion of New England, this study offers hearty intellectual fare. On other hand, for those whose latest read in field is, say, Janice Knight's Orthodoxies in Massachusetts (1994), a fairly recondite theological tour, Darren Staloff's The Making of an American Thinking Class not what one might expect.' Indeed, as he puts it, some students of American Puritanism may feel bemused by his interpretation of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, for in one sense his book is not about Puritans at all-not about, that is, intricate set of religious beliefs that underlay so many emigrants' decisions to cross Atlantic (p. 192). Staloff hunts a different beast. He wishes to interrogate the social and political features of early Massachusetts history that gave technical theological doctrines such powerful efficacy (p. xiv). Because Staloff's undisguised shibboleth power, readers might fear that they have in store yet another exhilarating, if finally enervating, New Historicist ride. But not so, for presiding genii are not Michel Foucault and his acolytes but rather Alvin Gouldner and George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, whose works on sociology of intellectuals initially provoked Staloff to consider how ministers and magistrates in Puritan Massachusetts comprised a collective interest who created a new form of political authority which author calls cultural domination (p. xv). But this, too, might bemuse readers, for it hardly a radical proposition. Half a century ago Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker wrote an entire book called The Puritan Oligarchy, and in our own time Sacvan Bercovitch has expended much ink on Puritans' supposedly hegemonic discourse.2 Less ideologically driven,

Does Real American History Begin with Jamestown and Plymouth?

Jonathon M. Chu is professor of history, University of Massachu setts, Boston. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles as well as Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen: The Puritan Adjustment to Quakerism in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (1985). In a 1994 William and Mary Quarterly article, Professor James Hijiya suggests that our surveys do not tell the whole story of America; that in starting from Jamestown and Plymouth, we leave out large amounts of significant and relevant material and marginalize those Americans who do not share in the standard history of the nation. Hijiya is not alone in his request for giving the complete picture; Paul Boyer and John Fea decry the treatment of religion; Harvey Kaye, that of radicals. All imply further that ignoring or denigrating multicultural issues in the survey ultimately proves to be bad scholarship, bad teaching, and bad for the republic (1). Hijiya's point raises in careful fashion the problem of coping with the multiple voices of American pluralism in the surveys of United States history and is one well worth considering. I am fully sympathetic to materials that are left out because scholars and authors of textbooks frequently fail to comprehend their own biases or the conceptual or epistemological limitations of their craft and the pedagogical implica tions this may have for saidents. Historians presume, despite Peter Novick's warning about the historicity of the idea of objectivity, that they can discover the truth of the past (2). Thus, when they ignore or misuse this knowledge in the construction of the American survey, they engage in a political act that trivializes or renders irrelevant those peoples or experiences which do not make it into their version of the canon.

Higher Law, Free Consent, Limited Authority: Church Government and Political Culture in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

DURING a service in 1639, John Cotton, having addressed his Boston congregation on a number of issues concerning Congregational church government and lay-clerical relations, turned to the practical lessons churchgoers might draw from his sermon. Let every man be studious of the the Lord has set around leaders, Cotton urged, for the Bible warns a Church or head of a Church could have done worse, he would have done it: This is one of the strains of nature. Churchgoers should never forget, he concluded, that all power is on earth [must] be limited, church power or other. Whether in church, state, or even the family, Cotton continued, let there be due bounds set. For though is counted a matter of danger to the State to limit Prerogatives ..., it is a further danger not to have them limited: They will be like a Tempest, if they be not limited.1 Recognized as the father of New England Congregationalism, Cotton frequently referenced larger political principles in his sermons on church government. He not only urged higher laws-founded on the Bible and, later, supported by the Cambridge Platform of church government, which Puritans de-

Conflicts of Law: Reconsidering the Influence of Religion on Law in Massachusetts Bay

AbstractThe idea that there were different points of view in seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay is not a new one. Several recent studies have undermined Perry Miller's monolithic “Puritan Mind”—demonstrating there were many strands of thought even among the nominally orthodox, and suggesting that we think of the settlers in New England as members of a movement with many ideas, rather than holders of a single point of view.While the idea that there were divisions within the category of Puritan is not a new one, the extent to which that ideological pluralism had a practical impact on the Bay colony's institutions, from its families to its governing system, has not yet been explored. This paper is a preliminary effort to demonstrate how ideological pluralism led to different conceptions of law, and had a practical effect on the legal system developed in the first generation of settlement in Massachusetts Bay.

The Keys of the Kingdom: Excommunication in Colonial Massachusetts

GIVEN the vituperation the Puritans heaped upon the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, known in less flamboyant terms as the Roman Catholic Church, it is surprising indeed to find that seventeenth-century Massachusetts Congregationalists practiced excommunication. Like their Catholic antagonists, Puritan theologians did not doubt that God had committed to their churches the power of the keys and with it the power to bind God's eternal judgment to the decrees of His earthly church. In