transgressing the bounds subversive enterprises among the puritan elite in massachusetts, 1630-1692 (religion in america)

[...]... demonstrate that the dangers posed by the outside world and various sorts of “others” were perceived in very similar terms over the course of the seventeenth century The tendency to form opposing factions, insisting on the one hand on isolation from that world and on the other on involvement in its growing diversity, also remained relatively constant, having been fixed during the antinomian controversy The old... danger in this line of defense, Winthrop responded that “It is not their cause [the minister’s] but the cause of the whole country and theywere unwillingthat it shouldcome forth, but that it was the glory and honour of God.”48 Still, Hutchinson’s insight was compelling The antinomian captain John Underhill, for example, in pleading on behalf of Stephen Greensmith, another individual who had questioned the. .. less Puritan as they responded to a series of changes—including the expansion of the capitalist market, the resumption of royalist rule in England, and the land shortages affecting second-generation sons—that intruded ever more insistently on their “closed,” “utopian” world during the second half of the seventeenth century.21 Central to most of these studies is the assumption that the elite men of the. .. participation in the Protector’s Western Design, intervention in the struggle between two rival leaders in New France, involvement in various episodes of privateering, and entanglement in schemes to overthrowthe governor of New Netherland (which required the cooperation of the exiled Underhill) These exploits were suspect because they were intended not solely to promote the security of the Bay Colony but rather... seventeenth century moved in an increasingly tribalistic direction Clergymen like Increase Mather, who condemned the Indian-hating talk and behavior he observed in the 1670s, nonetheless preached up the sins of frontier trading houses and insisted that godliness usually flowed “through the loyns of godly parents.” This clerical message simultaneously called into doubt the wholesomeness of intercultural trade... shown, the controversy over oathtaking in the Hutchinson trial had arisen when the defendant demanded that her accusers affirm before God their recollection of the exact words they alleged she had used in defaming them and the precise times and places where these words had been spoken.44 Understanding that the ministers might not remember the verbatim utterances, or the actual sequence, of Hutchinson’s... signed the Child petition in 1646, cited the injustices done during the antinomian controversy: “Witness also the Banishing so many to leave their habitations there, and seek places abroad elswhere, meerly for differing in Judgment from them as the Hutchinsons and severall families with them.”18 Maverick and Vane (a regicide) clearly did not see eye to eye on religious issues: but in the context of the. .. conversion, making it increasingly difficult—even if this was not Mather’s intention—to incorporate the Indian “other”into anyproductive or admirable role within the colony In the 1680s, the New England Way merged with a Whiggish defense of liberty and property rights, as colonial leaders endeavored to justify to in t r o duc t io n 15 English authorities, in resonant secular terms, their overthrow of the Stuart-appointed... against him, givingrise to the rumor that he hadplotted against the Bay Colony with “friends” among the Indians and French Partisans of Andros, meanwhile—as well as religious dissidents, like the Quaker Thomas Maule of Salem—continued to excoriate Massachusetts for treating the Indians unfairly and provoking war During the 1670s, Massachusetts elites, many of whom, like Gookin, had profited from their... witnesses, including ministers, to swear oaths as to the truth of their most damaging accusation against the “American Jezebel”: that Hutchinson had dishonored her figurative parents, the colony’s leaders, by charging openly that most Bay Colony ministers “did preach a covenant of works [rather than grace] and that they were not able ministers of the newtestament, and that they had not the seal of the spirit.”1 . sex in american publ ic l ife Kathleen M. Sands t r ansgressing t he bounds Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692 Louise A. Breen Transgressing the Bounds Subversive Enterprises among. Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Breen, Louise. Transgressingthe bounds : subversive enterprises among the Puritan elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692 /Louise Breen. p. cm. — (Religion in America. support to others seeking a wider toleration. And in 1637, Henry Vane, the secular leader of the antinomian party, sawno inconsistencyin conspiringagainst 8 t ransgressing t he bounds John Winthrop