¹ Hall, David D., ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University, 1968) 373Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text by page number. All italics within quotations appear in the original.

² Mrs. Hutchinson's lie first emerged during the church trial when she interrupted John Cotton's admonition against her “unsound and dayngerous principles” with the strange claim that she had not held those errors before her imprisonment (Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 368–72). The surface facts were otherwise: a year and more earlier, she had clearly expressed unorthodox views to the ministers and to others. In vain she tried to account for the contradiction by admitting to errors of speech but not of belief. Thenceforth she persisted in saying she had always believed as her teacher (Cotton) believed. Because she “would not acknowledge that shee had been at any time of that [erroneous] judgment, howsoever her expressions were” (ibid., 307), she was excommunicated. See John Winthrop, A Short Story of the Rise, reign, and mine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines (1644) 306–07; Cotton, The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648) 431–32 (both in Hall, Antinomian Controversy); and Winthrop, John, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649 (ed. Savage, James, 2 vols.; Boston: 1853), 1.310.Google Scholar

³ See “Bibliographical Note,” in Hall, Antinomian Controversy, esp. 442.

⁴ Winthrop, History, 1.310.

⁵ See esp. Morgan, Edmund S., The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (ed. Handlin, Oscar; Boston: Little, Brown, 1958) 151–53Google Scholar, and “The Case Against Anne Hutchinson,” New England Quarterly 10 (1937) 647Google Scholar; Ziff, Larzer, The Career of John Cotton (Princeton: Princeton University, 1962) 139Google Scholar; Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon, 1970) 259.Google Scholar

⁶ Adams, Charles Francis, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (2 vols.; Boston: 1892), 1.493, 528.Google Scholar

⁷ The state of women's education at the time made it inevitable that any woman—even a minister's daughter of intellectual power like Anne Hutchinson—would have been over her head in theological debate. Many lay males, despite better schooling, were similarly disadvantaged. (For a stunning example of a contemporary man in a state of deep verbal confusion over matters at least partly religious, see The Apologia of Robert Keayne [ed. Bailyn, Bernard; 1964Google Scholar; reprinted, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970].) That ministers and laity were not fully communicating, for reasons that may well include educational deficiencies, is part of the burden of this discussion. But some of the peculiarities of expression explored here, e.g., “separations” and use of the passive voice, cannot be accounted for by poor schooling alone.

⁸ Winthrop, History, 1.239.

⁹ Burke, Kenneth, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon, 1961) 1–2.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Rosenmeier, Jesper (“New England's Perfection: The Image of Adam and the Image of Christ in the Antinomian Crisis, 1634 to 1638,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 27 [1970] 457)Google Scholar claims that for Mrs. Hutchinson, “Christ's coming accomplished in His union with her” resolved the entire matter and meant that the history of redemption had already ended. Koehler, But Lyle (“The Case of the American Jezebels: Anne Hutchinson and Female Agitation during the Years of Antinomian Turmoil, 1636–1640,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 31 [1974] 67)Google Scholar argues that Mrs. Hutchinson expressed a distinct belief in the resurrection still to come. Whatever her eschatology, she clearly harbored a strong distaste for “fleshly” human participation in the resurrection scheme. See esp. Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 362–64.

¹¹ John Preston, A Heavenly Treatise of the Divine Love of Christ (London: 1640) 22.

¹² ”John Winthrop's Relation of his Religious Experience,” Winthrop Papers (5 vols.; [Boston]: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929–1947)Google Scholar, 3.342–43.

¹³ Winthrop, History, 1.246.

¹⁴ Thomas Hooker, The Saints Guide (London: 1645) 28.

¹⁵ John Cotton, The Way of Life (London: 1641) 29.

¹⁶ Idem, Christ the Fountain of Life (London: 1651) 46.

¹⁷ Idem, Way of Life, 29.

¹⁸ A Sermon Delivered at Salem, 1636, John Cotton on the Churches of New England (ed. Larzer Ziff; Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University, 1968) 63.

¹⁹ Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., The Puritans (rev. ed., 2 vols.; New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 1.39.

²⁰ Cotton, Christ the Fountain, 51.

²¹ Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption (London: 1659) 158–59.

²² Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (3d ed.; Cambridge: Harvard University, 1957) 133.

²³ An extremely complex theological term, Word is used in this discussion only in the sense that “the sensible analogue for it tends clearly to be the spoken word” (Walter J. Ong, S.J., The Presence of the Word [New Haven: Yale University, 1967] 282).Google Scholar

²⁴ Cotton, Christ the Fountain, 99.

²⁵ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “error” def. 5 and “mistake” def. 8. To Thomas Shepard this is error compounded: “To turne of[f] many of those groce Errors with soe slight an Answer as your Mistake, I fear it doth not stand with true Repentance. … She puts of[f] many Thinges with her Mistake” (Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 377–78).

²⁶ Adam Winthrop to Margaret Tyndal, March 31, 1618, Winthrop Papers, 1.220.

²⁷ James, William, Lecture 18, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Collier, 1961) 337.Google Scholar

²⁸ Miller, Perry, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University, 1956) 2.Google Scholar

²⁹ Ong, Presence of the Word, 63, 275, 135, 275.

³⁰ Cotton, Christ the Fountain, 95, 96.

³¹ Idem, Sermon … at Salem, 63.

³² “The Danger of Desertion; c. April 1631,” Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland, 1626–1633 (Williams, George H. et al., eds.; HTS 28; Cambridge: Harvard University, 1975) 244.Google Scholar The passage is from the T (traditional) version but it does not differ significantly from William Fenner's alternate version F (“What if I should tell you what God told me yesternight that he would destroy England and lay it waste?”). I have assumed that Mrs. Hutchinson either heard this “notable sermon” (p. 222) herself or more likely, heard about it at second hand, although it is conceivable that she read it in Fenner's or in some other auditor's manuscript.

³³ In the Geneva Bible (1560) “the letter” in this verse is annotated, “Whose minister Moses was.” Price, James L. (“The Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians,” The Interpreter's One-Volume Commentary on the Bible [ed. Laymon, Charles M.; Nashville: Abingdon, 1971] 815)Google Scholar contrasts “the Spirit” in this verse with “the old covenant in a written code, lit. ‘in the letter’—i.e., the Mosaic law.” For 2 Cor 3:6 I have cited the KJV; only in spelling does it here differ from the Geneva Bible.

³⁴ The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter (23 vols.; London: 1830), 5.559.Google Scholar

³⁵ Miller, Perry, Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953) 37.Google Scholar

³⁶ Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity (Boston: 1726) 32.

³⁷ Battis, Emery (Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1962] esp. chap. 17)Google Scholar gives a provocative socio-economic analysis of the “cultural confusion” (p. 251). Battis's inventory of communal standards in flux can be extended to include linguistic standards.

³⁸ Miller, Errand, 191.

³⁹ See Rosenmeier, “New England's Perfection,” esp. 442–45, 450–53, for an enlightening comparison of Shepard and Cotton on conversion. Among first generation preachers perhaps Cotton was most direct in treating the inward experience of rebirth, but even his teachings failed to provide a common ground for understanding.

⁴⁰ Coolidge, John S., The Pauline Renaissance in England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970) 65, 66 n. 33.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Benjamin Colman, Gospel Order Revived ([New York]: 1700) 8, quoted in Morgan, Edmund S., Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University, 1963) 150.Google Scholar

⁴² Thomas Goodwin, Jr., “Life,” in Goodwin, Works (5 vols.; London: 1681–1704) vol. 5, quoted in Haller, William, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper & Row, 1957) 95.Google Scholar The personal details of Goodwin's Pauline conversion were not known until his son published them in 1704. But Haller reports that they formed the basis of his preaching and that he probably talked freely about his vivid experience outside of the pulpit.

⁴³ Middlekauf, Robert, “Piety and Intellect in Puritanism,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 22 (1965) 457–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁴ Winters, Yvor, “Maule's Curse,” In Defense of Reason (New York: Swallow, 1947) 159.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Ibid., 174–75.