In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37.3 (2007) 0459-460


Reviewed by
Darren Staloff
City College of New York
The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided. By Michael P. Winship (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2005) 184 pp. $35.00 cloth $14.95 paper

Winship's study of the trials of the Antinomian (or "free grace") controversy in early Massachusetts is an engaging narrative perfectly suited to a general readership. Winship is thoroughly versed in the intricacies of Puritan thought and practice. He brings to his account a keen analysis of the issues surrounding the first major crisis for the fledgling "city on a hill." The account is eminently readable, admirably re-creating the mindset of those "precise" Protestants that sought to rebuild a Christian commonwealth in New England. Indeed, the book could easily replace such classics as Edmund Morgan's The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John [End Page 459] Winthrop (Boston, 1958) as an introduction to early American history. Assessing its interdisciplinary status, however, is a complicated matter.

At first glance, Winship's book bears little, if any, imprint of interdisciplinary focus. In large part culled from his earlier Making Heretics: Militant Protestants and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, 2002), he offers hardly any new research. In fact, aside from a brief bibliographical essay, the book lists no reference material at all. Explicit theorization is entirely absent, as is any attempt to integrate such ancillary disciplines as the sociology of religion or political theory. Nor does Winship make any attempt to draw on insights from social or legal history, both of which have figured largely in previous accounts of the Hutchinson controversy. Even issues of gender are treated rather lightly, despite the Hutchinson's trial's enduring fascination for historians of gender in early America. Winship's book is, in the classic sense of the term, a pure narrative of religious history. The focus of the book as a whole, as well as of each chapter, is chronological. The actors are introduced, the stage is set, and the story marches along its timeline, albeit with great verve and grace. The characters of the central figures, especially Thomas Shepard, John Cotton, and Hutchinson are vividly drawn but without any allusion to psychological theorization or social context. On first glance, this book might well seem not to be interdisciplinary at all.

That conclusion, however, would be erroneous. Winship draws together the disparate disciplines of legal, political, and religious history, arguing that Hutchinson's two trials were "an attempt to use the law to protect the unity of Massachusetts's Christian society," an attempt that ironically "almost tore the society apart" (3). Rather than borrowing the technical idioms of legal and political history, however, Winship's interpretation is presented in the terms and vocabulary of seventeenth-century Puritan casuists. Implicit in this analysis are the contextualist assumptions associated with the works of Pocock and Skinner—namely, that the actions of historical agents can be understood only in terms of their beliefs, described in language that they would recognize and endorse.1 Such an approach is subject to a range of criticisms, but it does have the virtue of presenting what was once called the Antinomian Controversy in a light that is internally coherent and recognizable to those conversant with the religious culture of Puritan Massachusetts and England. That it also makes for a well-told and engaging narrative suggests that it is possible to practice history in an interdisciplinary fashion without the technical idioms that often alienate general readers.

Footnote

1. The contextualist case is stated in Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory, VIII (1969), 3–53, and most famously exemplified in John Greville Agard Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).

...

pdf

Share