The Magus of Connecticut: How Taking Alchemy Seriously Changes Early New England History

In this original and intelligent study, Walter Woodward shows himself deeply knowledgeable as he opens up the history of seventeenth-century New England to new avenues of consideration. Woodward centers his account on John Winthrop, Jr., the son of the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, who himself became a governor of Connecticut. However, Woodward's attentiveness to Winthrop's alchemical beliefs and practices, drawing on extensive attention to alchemy in recent decades by historians of science, allows him to offer a significantly different interpretation of Puritan New England, one with more capacity for toleration and intercultural sensitivity than one usually finds in historians' accounts of this time and place. Woodward's provocative and gracefully written monograph should be read widely by historians of early America and of early modern science.

While the narrative spine of the book is Winthrop's life, Prospero's America is a cultural history, not a biography. Woodward writes that "Winthrop, by almost every account, was a gentle, affable, and likable human being" (p. 193), but we do not finish the book feeling we know him as a person. The issue is one of sources. Woodward can scrutinize Winthrop's account books, the titles in his library, and many letters written to him, but much of his outgoing correspondence is lost. Moreover, alchemists were committed to secrecy, to the circulation of knowledge only within the elect; much that they communicated was done in code or face to face. Without a corpus of letters or a diary, Woodward can't get at Winthrop's interior life. However, this matters little, as Woodward uses Winthrop's life as a route into a serious reconsideration of what we thought we knew about New England. Each chapter links a period in Winthrop's life with some wider issue. Winthrop's pursuit of alchemical studies allows Woodward to explore the larger significance of alchemy in the early modern world.

In 1631 Winthrop joined his father in New England, where a discussion of his various enterprises is the basis for Woodward's examination of the relationship between Puritanism and economic activity. In New London, Winthrop became an ally of the Pequots, which in Woodward's hands becomes a provocative analysis of Puritan-Indian relations. Winthrop's highly regarded service as a physician allows Woodward to discuss medical culture. After Winthrop became Connecticut's governor in 1657, he served as a magistrate in a series of witchcraft trials; here, too, Woodward has useful commentary on understandings of magic among Puritans. In the wake of the Restoration, Winthrop returned to England and was able to negotiate a remarkably advantageous charter for Connecticut. Winthrop's reputation as an alchemist was key to his ability to negotiate the difficult waters of English politics in the last decade of his life. While Woodward structures his book around the life of one man, Prospero's America is, at its heart, a deeply informed study of meaning-making in seventeenth-century Connecticut, drawing in science, politics, religion, Indian-Puritan relations, and economic development, all of which were connected through Winthrop's alchemy.

In taking Winthrop's alchemy seriously, Woodward benefits from the serious attention alchemy has received in recent decades among historians of science. Once dismissed as a foolish pursuit displaced by the practicality and accuracy wrought by the Scientific Revolution, alchemy's place in the history of science has been substantially rethought. For one thing, historians now recognize just how pervasive it was among the learned in early modern Europe. As historians such as William R. Newman, Pamela H. Smith, and Lawrence M. Principe have shown, alchemy was an innovative, expansive, and intellectually coherent practice that engaged a large number of men throughout Europe.¹ Philosophically, alchemy was rooted in Neoplatonism. By circa 1600, rediscovered texts that extended or reinterpreted Plato...