The Many Puritans of Early New England

Every once in a while it is refreshing to see a series of biographies of the Puritans extend its scope beyond the usual Mather/Winthrop/Sewall trinity. Francis J. Bremer has written a series of brief biographies on some of New England’s earliest leading lights as well as a longer treatment of the life of New Haven founder John Davenport. While few, if any, of the subjects of these books will be wholly unfamiliar to students of Puritan New England, some are more familiar then others. John Winthrop, whose biography begins First Founders, is, of course, one of the most familiar names from early New England, although Anne Hutchinson and Anne Bradstreet may give him a run for his money among today’s college students. Others whose biographies are included here, such as Lady Deborah Moody and Samuel Winthrop, while certainly not obscure, are likely to be less familiar to those who concentrate on areas other than early seventeenth-century New England. Given that Bremer notes in the introduction to First Founders that “too often the story of New England is told as if the region were simply Massachusetts (or even Boston) writ large,” his decision to focus almost entirely on individuals whose colonial experience was primarily in Massachusetts is strange (p. 2). John Davenport’s and Anne Eaton’s biographies bring us to New Haven, but Connecticut, Plymouth, and Rhode Island appear only as passing mentions in stories that have their foundation in Massachusetts.

Both First Founders and Building a New Jerusalem are very readable works free of jargon and unnecessarily complicated prose. Both invite the reader to imagine the early Puritans as actors on a less parochial stage than nonspecialists usually envision. Bremer treats John Winthrop’s life in England with as much seriousness as his more well known time in Massachusetts. John’s son Samuel Winthrop begins in Massachusetts and spends his adult life as a Quaker plantation owner in Antigua. Others, like Hugh Peter, become important actors in England’s civil wars. John Davenport, the subject of Building a New Jerusalem, does not arrive in North America until halfway through the book. His early, formative years were spent in England and the Netherlands. Those early years in which he struggled with his conscience over the degree to which he could conform to the dictates of the Anglican church and with the politics of the English churches in the Netherlands set the stage for Davenport’s creation of a utopian Christian community in New Haven. Davenport’s concern with the cause of international Protestantism (an effort to stress commonalities over minor liturgical and doctrinal differences in the service of a united Christendom) undercuts his modern reputation as one of the most intolerant and hard-nosed of Puritan leaders. Throughout, Bremer provides valuable background on English and European politics and controversies.

Both the short biographies and longer work on John Davenport are extremely sympathetic treatments of the Puritan leadership in its early years. First Founders takes on the old stereotype that refuses to die, despite many historians’ best efforts: that New England was a monolithic authoritarian theocracy filled with intolerant killjoys. In Building a New Jerusalem, Bremer attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of John Davenport, who has long been considered one of the most “puritan” of Puritans. In both works, Bremer reminds us that “puritan” was a pejorative term hurled at Englishmen and women who held a relatively wide variety of beliefs and that there was no typical Puritan. The biographies that make up First Founders certainly suggest some of that variety. Bremer’s subjects turn Quaker and Anabaptist, and some flirt with heresies even more troubling to magistrates and ministers. They wrestle with their faith in a variety of ways. Some return to fight...