America Discovers English Puritanism

Michael P. Winship.Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 311pp. Notes and index. $29.95.

In this compelling study of the esoteric yet dramatic events commonly known as the Antinomian Controversy, Michael Winship has produced what will stand as the most complete and authoritative account for many years to come. Winship has slogged his way through all possible sources, from early-seventeenth-century puritan theology to late-twentieth-century English historiography, and come up with a significant reinterpretation of both the crisis and colonial American Puritanism. All of this is accomplished within as griping and suspenseful a narrative as one is ever likely to encounter in the field of puritan studies.

Winship's revision is so thorough it hardly resembles the story we have grown accustomed to. Most historians have interpreted the Antinomian Crisis, taking place as it did only a few years after the first colonists arrived in Massachusetts, as a struggle over the issues of founding a New World society. Orthodoxy and the authority of agricultural patriarchy, often embodied in the person of John Winthrop, combat the more freewheeling ideas of the urban merchant class in Boston, epitomized by the outspoken woman, Anne Hutchinson. Portrayed as a struggle between two distinct takes on religion (heresy and orthodoxy), economy (capitalist merchants versus anti-capitalist farmers) or society (patriarchs versus women), the Antinomian Controversy has been seen as a decisive conflict between coherent groups. With Antinomianism vanquished, "orthodoxy" and a conservative social order became the New England Way for generations to come.

Theology, the focus of most of the ink spilled over the crisis at the time, has generally been treated as merely the obscure means to concrete ends. According to Winship, this seriously misreads what was really going on. By keeping the conflict over religious belief at the center of his account, Winship uncovers a surprising degree of confusion, uncertainty, and passion among these allegedly dour puritans. The struggle he found was not about gender or the economy or even heresy—at least not at first. Rather, in a move that proponents of the new narrative history would appreciate, it was about people. Making Heretics names names and assigns blame: Thomas Shepard, John Cotton, and John Wheelwright all get taken to task. John Winthrop is also taken down a notch. Anne Hutchinson, on the other hand, emerges as a much more interesting and complex individual than previously imagined. Of an elite family with an unknown number of servants at her command, she was no ordinary woman. Able to cite scripture with the best of university-trained ministers, she was no ordinary intellect either. Her fate hinged in part on her gender, but only in part. To explain what happened to her, Winship has taken her ideas and actions very seriously—just as the ministers and magistrates of colonial Massachusetts did. All in all, the story of Making Heretics is as complex and interesting as the individuals it involves.

Winship's greatest contribution is to radically reconstruct the crisis. In twelve tightly focused chapters, he breaks down events step by step. Since his main point is that it was not clear who was orthodox or who was heretical until after the crisis was over, he avoids discussing the event in terms of "Puritans" versus "Antinomians," going so far as to re-label it the "free grace controversy." Antinomianism was in the air, but the extent to which it was a threat actually depended on highly contingent and personal circumstances. One of Winship's more interesting revisions is his discovery that at the root of the crisis was a fundamental a clash of personalities between two headstrong ministers, Thomas Shepard and John Cotton. It turns out that Anne Hutchinson, the most famous victim of the crisis, was not its main target. John Cotton was. Shepard resented the preaching of the more famous Cotton and forced a showdown that almost destroyed the fledgling colony. A leading member of...