Coming into Communion: Pastoral Dialogues in Colonial New England (review)

A woman waiting to be hanged for infanticide; a daughter and wife of ministers, undergoing a spiritual crisis over taking communion; the brilliant wife of a theological genius, experiencing a vision of divine grace—these are the cases from which Laura Henigman develops her analysis of women in crisis who use body-centered language, connected to pregnancy and mothering, to challenge binary idioms and assert "a spiritual self-identity to which community is inherently crucial" (177). This richly nuanced study of early-eighteenth-century women in New England excavates their voices from documents created by ministers for purposes of their own and restores these voices to specific dialogues, within a cultural space threatened by centrifugal social and political forces and filled with the concomitant desires for community and security.

Henigman constructs her first section around the case of Esther Rogers, hanged in July 1701 for murdering her newborn child the previous November. During her nine months in jail, Rogers underwent a religious conversion, a "coming into communion" that was the result of intense pastoral efforts by the Ipswich community but especially by minister John Rogers, who, focusing on maternal killing rather than on illicit sexuality, granted her "a spiritual dignity" others had withheld (44). His three public sermons on the occasion appeared in Death the Wages of Sin, an account compiled by six ministers in which different agendas coexist uneasily with each other and with the voice of the condemned. Reading these against other execution sermons, from Cotton Mather's collection Pillars of Salt (1699) to sermons dealing with infanticides in the 1730s, Henigman finds stories of failed communion and fractured community, repaired (imperfectly and too late) by women like Esther Rogers, who seek spiritual identity through communal identification.

Spiritual seeking and maternal language connect Rogers's story to the stories of religious poet Jane Colman Turell (1708–35) and Sarah Pierpont Edwards (1710–58). Struggling for maternity through two miscarriages and one infant death, Turell uses maternal language "not only to articulate her own spiritual identity but also to articulate her ideal of the religious community" (90). In Reliquiae Turellae, her father, Benjamin Coleman, and her husband, Ebenezer Turell, published excerpts from her writings interwoven with texts of their own. From this, Henigman reconstructs Jane Colman Turell's struggles as she sought her father's advice on how to loosen her close bond with him and accept her husband's counsel and congregation. Focusing on Turell's maternal imagery, Henigman leads us through her spiritual travails and a fine reading of her poems.

Sarah Edwards's famous vision of 1742, an account of which her husband Jonathan used in Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival of Religion to defend spiritual awakenings against charges of disorderliness, constitutes Henigman's third case. Contrasting Jonathan's dualistic vision of spirituality with Sarah's ("a difference not in theology but in affect" [162]), Henigman reads her narrative as "a most intense vision of congregational unity" (168), presented in an idiom that her husband eventually adopts. Through all three sections of her book, Henigman wants us to "develop the habit of reading . . . minister-authored texts as pastoral documents, that is, as documents inflected, even if silently, by lay people" (178). She makes her case well.