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  • You Don't Have to Go Home, but You Can't Stay Here
  • Richard A. Bailey (bio)
Nan Goodman . Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. iii + 206 pp. Notes and index. $59.95.

Perhaps the one piece of knowledge about colonial New England that many students bring into survey classes is that the Puritans, who wore lots of black alongside buckled hats and shoes and railed against fun of any kind, were quite adept at making certain that any person who refused to wear similar drab clothing or who looked to have any fun whatsoever did not remain in their communities for very long—or, at the very least, did not feel at home living next to them. If it were not humble, it seems, then it could not be home—or not a Puritan home at least. Explaining that things might not always have been quite that simple does not take very long in most cases. Nan Goodman's recent offering, Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England, promises to make dispelling at least some of these misconceptions even easier. Arguing that "it was the legal punishment of banishment and not the religious grounds that may have precipitated it that became one of the major catalysts for defining what the Puritan community could and should look like," Goodman illustrates some of the ways that early New Englanders fashioned homes in North America, even, or maybe especially, when doing so meant not always acting very neighborly (p. 8). While perhaps underestimating the significance of religious conceptions in the formation and proliferation of some Puritan communities, Goodman ultimately offers a fascinating analysis of how the principles of inclusion and exclusion in the seventeenth-century northern colonies both made New England home for some and made certain it could not be for others.

Banished links the concepts of common law and of rhetoric in the practice of banishment in Puritan New England—a fact even more impressive given the compact nature of Goodman's treatment. Focusing on events that occurred primarily in the period from 1620 to 1684, Goodman demonstrates ably that banishment in early New England defined not only who was included in a specific community, but also who was excluded, making the practice "a central [End Page 385] . . . way of defining the place and the people within it" (p. 2). To tell this story, though, Goodman asserts that such banishments should be seen through lenses other than the traditional one of Puritan religion. Failing to do so, she claims, limits scholars to following "the Puritans' lead" (p. 3).

She might well be correct here, especially given that her examples were generally expelled from their respective communities for reasons that fell outside the bounds of traditional religion. In Goodman's estimation, these nonreligious reasons for banishment confirm her efforts to link common law and rhetoric, allowing her to place "religious conceptions into dialogue with the legal ones that have traditionally been left out of the equation" (p. 5). As she treats these dialogues in specific banishment cases, Goodman models the potential usefulness of examining Puritan New England through a different lens. Fittingly, Goodman selects rather well-known instances of banishment to make her argument. In "To Entertain Strangers," she attempts to stress a basic similarity between the generally unconnected banishments of Thomas Morton and Anne Hutchinson. The link? Hospitality. Goodman shows how early New Englanders politicized the concept of hospitality in order to serve a variety of ends, including fashioning it into a "rhetorical device for shaping community" (p. 28).

She then moves from the politicization of hospitality to the problem of homogeneity in "The 'Predicament of Ubi,'" concentrating especially on the banishment of Roger Williams. While she does not deny Williams' efforts to strive for a "pure and homogenous church," Goodman sees his removal from the Massachusetts Bay Colony more as a result of his strivings after heterogeneous and "diverse identities in the civil sphere" (p. 68). Williams' concern for and advocacy of the separation of the spiritual and the secular led him to argue, Goodman contends, for the legality and...

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