Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (review)

Michael P. Winship's Making Heretics is essential reading for those interested in the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's Antinomian Controversy or for those continuing the redirection of New England studies away from a monolithic colonial "mind" toward, in Winship's words, "the pluralism of American Puritanism" (248, n.13). Winship's work, the first full-length study of the crisis itself in years, mines archival sources anew in order to construct a narrative of events and personalities that he argues have been neglected in most recent approaches to the events of the late 1630s. Even those who will remain unconvinced by his de-emphasis of gender issues or his reconstruction of the crisis from sometimes sketchy sources should find much to admire and much from which to learn.

Rather than viewing the controversy as the inevitable collision of the immovable forces of radical and orthodox beliefs, male and female piety, clerical and lay power, and the like, as other critics have, Winship argues that the crisis was not "fixed and structural." Rather, he sees it as "political, as personalities, personal agendas, and an ongoing process of judgment calls, stakings of positions, and shifting coalitions, a series of short-term events having short-term effects with cumulative results" (2). Here is history before the fact, before those crafty spin doctors Thomas Weld and John Winthrop got a clamp on the publicity issuing from the colony, before Nathaniel Hawthorne thought to bequeath his vexed vision of Anne Hutchinson—heroine? harpy?—to generations of American readers. Winship refocuses our attention; he renames the crisis. Rather than the "antinomian controversy," which he argues is a retrospective, partisan phrase, or even the "familist controversy," which reflects charges leveled against Hutchinson and others in the late 1630s, he directs us to consider the events as part of the "free grace controversy," which emphasizes the proximity of the two "sides" in the events rather than the post-crisis heretical divide insisted upon by historians who took the word of the ministerial winners as definitive.

Winship breaks down other seeming structural divides as he introduces the important issue of the transatlantic production of colonial identity in this period, rightly affording England a place in explaining the crisis ("on top of everything else, the free grace controversy was about the common colonial problem of reproducing hierarchical English lines of authority in situations where those lines were confused" [231]), and he sees the crisis as a "foreshadowing" of events in England when lines of authority became blurred there as well, during the civil wars and Commonwealth government. Yet the crisis was distinctly American, he suggests, as he sharply divides the outcome in New England from the struggles in Old, arguing that, unlike England, "America offered the alternative of mobility" (233). In the colonies, dissidents had elbow room.

Above all, Winship usefully reminds us of the range of actors present on the antinomian stage. John Cotton, John Winthrop, and Anne Hutchinson are here, as we would expect, but Henry Vane, John Wheelwright, and Thomas Shepard, surprisingly, get top billing. His construction of personalities leads to some unexpected moments. John Winthrop, in his account, comes across as a surprisingly fair-minded leader (see p. 206)—surprising, at least, to those of us who know his involvement primarily through his vituperative 1644 account, A Short Story of the Rise, Reign and Ruin of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines. At the same time, Winship endows him with a Dirty Harry approach to power that seems more in keeping with my sense of his participation in the conflict: when Boston messengers challenge Winthrop's jurisdiction in a church assembly, "Winthrop replied, in so many words, make my day" (157). The mapping of character analysis onto a chronological structure is especially helpful, and moments such as these enliven the story without becoming obnoxious.

The strength and vigor of the book lie in the later, chronological chapters, perhaps particularly so to...