Anne Hutchinson

Anne Hutchinson engaged a diverse group of powerful men as well as the disenfranchised during the mid-1630s in Boston’s so-called Antinomian Controversy, the name given to the theological battle between John Cotton, who emphasized free grace, and other clerics who focused upon preparation for those seeking salvation. Hutchinson followed Cotton’s position, presented his theology in meetings in her home, and inspired her followers, male and female, to reject pastors opposing Cotton’s position. Hutchinson’s followers included leading men who opposed John Winthrop’s leadership of Massachusetts Bay Colony; this dispute also became an arena where Winthrop reasserted his power. Hutchinson represents the Puritans’ drive for spiritual development within, including her claim of revelation. She is best understood within a transatlantic framework illustrating both the tools of patriarchal oppression and, more importantly, the appeal of Puritan spirituality for women.

Epilogue

This chapter briefly considers the persistence of Anne Hutchinson as a historical figure, remembered but frequently misunderstood, across the centuries. Notes the limited sources and chronicles the changing perceptions of her that accompanied the changing viewpoints of Puritan New England. For many, the treatment of Hutchinson became a marker for society’s understanding of the character of Puritans. After changing perceptions of her as heretic and egotistical sinner, nuisance, brilliant woman oppressed and misunderstood, transformative philosopher, and advocate for women’s rights that accompanied.

The Passion of Anne Hutchinson

Anne Hutchinson remains an iconic figure in early American history and women’s history. More than a hundred years of scholarship on Puritans and New England colonization have positioned the controversy surrounding her as a critical moment during the first decade of Massachusetts’s settlement, although the importance of Hutchinson herself (rather than her male opponents and supporters) and the actual nature of her challenge have been matters of intense debate. While most articles and books emphasize the theological and political battles among men, women’s historians have turned to Hutchinson, but as emblematic of the status and limitations surrounding women. This project approaches Hutchinson from a position informed by intellectual and women’s history, pushing into the intricate, competing, but sometimes complementary cultural systems of Puritan spirituality and gender ideology. The book examines Puritanism and its practitioners over the long term, from its mid-sixteenth-century origins through and beyond the establishment of the New England colonies to the English Civil War and the fragmentation of English Puritanism in the 1660s. Through Anne Hutchinson, her predecessors, and her followers, the book explores the relationship between gender as a cultural system in flux and the radical religious community that inspired the colonization of New England. Puritanism was, perhaps, a religious system that provided strategies and justifications for controlling women. Yet the religious radicalism, ideology, and practices also attracted and empowered powerful women who actively supported the clergy, flourished spiritually, connected with God experientially, and came to lead as advisers, prophets, and preachers. Anne Hutchinson marks the power and promise of such charisma.

Introduction

Underscores the focus upon Anne Hutchinson, not ministers and magistrates, and lays out kay scholarship and the problems driving this study. Acknowledges scholarship upon sexual politics and patriarchal oppression, but turns attention to the questions: Hutchinson’s religious background, her belief that she had received revelations from God, and her charismatic leadership in Boston. The essay identifies scope of study, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and transatlantic and provides a foreshadowing of the scholarship on Puritans as dissenters, Puritan radicalism and the appeal to women, and the transformation of New England’s religious culture.

Dissent in New England

The New England colonies were settled in the early seventeenth century by men and women who could not in conscience subscribe to all aspects of the faith and practice of the Church of England. In creating new societies they struggled with how to define their churches and their relationship with the national Church they dissented from. As their New England Way evolved the orthodox leaders of the new order identified and took action against those who challenged it. Interaction with dissenters such as Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Baptists, and Quakers helped to further define the colonial religious establishment.

Protestant Baroque

Much traditional scholarship on the Baroque sees the notion of the Protestant Baroque as contradictory. This chapter explores ‘emergent’ or ‘partial’ Baroque characteristics in two Protestant poets, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer, followed by the Protestant women of Little Gidding, the ‘Arminian nunnery’, whose ‘storying’ and biblical harmonies show how broader cultural dynamics could permeate even a marginalised group of women, who have only recently attracted critical attention. I look across the Atlantic to examine the English equivalent of the colonial Baroque prominent in Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic culture, and consider two New England writers – briefly, Anne Bradstreet and more thoroughly, Anne Hutchinson – to analyse the extent to which New England can be set within the scope of not just colonial but specifically Protestant colonial Baroque.