Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676 (review)

The historiography of colonial New England has deep interdisciplinary roots. Long before the professionalization of historical scholarship, some of the region’s most influential writing about its past came from literary artists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Even after the rise of modern academic disciplines, Miller and other literary scholars were among the strongest voices in New England’s historiography, their scholarship grounded in the study of Puritan religion as well.¹ By the 1960s, methods drawn from demography, sociology, and economics began to compete with belletristic approaches.

Science studies, however, lagged far behind, partly because alchemy, the most prominent form of natural philosophy practiced in New England’s first century, fit poorly within the triumphal narratives favored by historians of science, and partly because earlier scholars dismissed it as an exotic offshoot from the main stem of Puritan orthodoxy. The appearance of Prospero’s America marks a great leap forward in the integration of science studies with the grand tradition of colonial New England historiography, as well as in the integration of New England into studies of the early modern Atlantic world.

Woodward defines John Winthrop, Jr., as a “Christian alchemist,” a term devised to bridge the gap between older studies of alchemy that saw the practice as essentially spiritual and occult and more recent ones that emphasize its utilitarian purposes. For Woodward, Winthrop’s alchemy was indeed spiritual but by no means occult. He situates Winthrop within the “Republic of Alchemy and the Pansophic Movement” that converged in England during the Thirty Years’ War to escape from Europe’s violence and to experiment with various designs for a better world. Prospero’s America tells the story of Winthrop’s multifaceted efforts to bring the ideals of the pansophists to the New World.

The story begins with Winthrop as the promoter of a plantation at New London intended to join New England’s natives with English settlers to create prosperity from the hidden mineral resources of the region. One of the strongest chapters turns to Winthrop’s work as an alchemical healer among both New London’s native and English populations as they acclimated to the conditions of a changing world. In this context, Woodward demonstrates the centrality of alchemical learning within New England’s Puritan culture most convincingly. Later chapters describe Winthrop as a power broker in the transatlantic politics of knowledge production. As governor of Connecticut, Winthrop resolved internal disputes (including Connecticut’s witchcraft crisis of the 1660s) and protected the region’s resources from the prying inquiries of English scientific imperialists, whose quest for knowledge was tied to colonial projects that threatened the independence of New England’s polities.

In tracing the career of a figure so thoroughly enmeshed in early New England’s culture, Woodward must venture into the dense thickets of historiography surrounding every prominent issue in the region’s history. Occasionally, the thickets entangle him, as when he cites one religious historian’s careful account of New England’s primitivist “goal” as “the restoration of prior perfection” and immediately contradicts it with reference to a literary scholar’s fanciful claim that Puritans were “futurists embarked on a mission to usher in the millennium” (40). But Woodward mostly displays a sure hand in providing the best available account of the predisciplinary career of New England’s most multidimensional founder.