The most familiar way of conjoining religion and queerness in America is proscriptive. This is so despite the vivid presence of non-normative sexualities in the sacred stories of nearly all religions and the formative labors of queer-identified persons in their ranks. In invocations of American religion the default religion is likely to be Christian; the default Christianity, Protestant; the primary office of religion, morality; and the morality in question, sexual morality. In this way, the very category of religion in America is shaped by the pathologizing of non-normative sexualities. If to embrace queer lives is to depart from faithful Christian witness, then all departures from right religion bear the taint of suspect desire. But exile is not the only place of queerness in American religious lives, as literary history amply confirms. By what paths did early American texts come to identify religion as heteronormative? And how has a more generative religious imagination of queerness come to shape American literature? This chapter tracks these questions by moving between Puritan invocations of queerness as civic and spiritual threat and later rejoinders in American letters.

The first part of this chapter explores the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony’s conception of law on matters of religion. For the Pilgrims, law was both the memorialization of their commitment to the Word of God and an instrument for sustaining a sanctified society. The second part of the chapter details how the legislature and the courts of Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted many statutes and issued scores of judicial decisions to help ensure the success of their Puritan “Citty vpon a Hill.” In 1691 Massachusetts Bay was issued a new charter as a royal colony. The 1691 provincial charter required that “liberty of Conscience” be allowed “in the Worshipp of God to all Christians (Except Papists).” The third part of the chapter focuses on the laws enacted and adjudicated during the provincial period to determine whether Massachusetts Bay complied with the new charter’s requirement about religious toleration. Massachusetts Bay’s Puritan Standing Order—the unofficial alliance between Congregational ministers and godly magistrates—would not abandon the animating principle of Puritan Congregationalism without a fight, and that fight was waged in large part through statutes and court cases. It was not until 1833 that Massachusetts disestablished church and state.

This chapter explores the relationship between the animating principle of colonial Connecticut—Puritan Congregationalism—and the colony’s laws. Part I chronicles how central Puritan Congregationalism was in the organic law, statutory law, and common law of the River Colony at which Connecticut was originally planted. Part II investigates the law of the New Haven Colony, a separate community settled in 1638 that joined with the River Colony in 1665 to create a unified Connecticut Colony. Part III examines the law of the unified Connecticut Colony and endeavors to discern when Connecticut’s laws began to deviate from Puritan Congregationalism. Part IV concludes the chapter by assessing the events that led to the official demise in the Connecticut Constitution of 1818 of Puritan Congregationalism as the animating principle of Connecticut. As will be seen, the law of colonial Connecticut eventually came to reflect the idea of religious toleration sweeping, albeit unevenly and imperfectly, across the larger Atlantic World.

This chapter offers a survey of religious dissimulation in early modern England, where questions concerning its legitimacy were, owing to the unpredictable course of the English Reformation(s), arguably more pressing than anywhere else in Europe. While most Catholic and Protestant theological authorities condemned dissimulation in principle, the practice must have been widespread and was perceived, at least by those in power, as a political reality that could not simply be ignored. This chapter outlines both ecclesiological and political justifications for tolerating those who dissembled their faith and argues that their ambivalent status and the often unstable practices of policing such religious dissimulation should be considered a central aspect of early modern approaches to the problem of religious toleration. Religious dissimulation was a highly controversial practice, and toleration for inward dissent was never a given. Especially in times of political crisis, church and state authorities frequently resorted to aggressive measures to access the secret beliefs of religious dissenters, which belied the Queen’s alleged refusal to make windows into men’s hearts.

This chapter discusses the collaboratively written First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1599) as a response to Shakespeare’s irreverent transformation of the eponymous Lollard martyr into Falstaff. Oldcastle restores the Lollard martyr to his heroic stature and is therefore often read in terms of a moderate, that is, politically loyal and conformist form of Puritanism. However, the play arguably, in its representation of nonconformity and a conditional form of political obedience, is more radical than is usually assumed and voices a nuanced challenge to royal supremacy over the Church of England. As this chapter further suggests, the play’s nonconformist ethos therefore also contributes to a more ambivalent conception of theatricality than the one embodied by Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a conception of theatricality that is defined by a self-reflexive distrust in the space between seeming and being.

Freedom of speech was conceptualized in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and grew into common acceptance, primarily through Puritan belief in parrhesia in the Bible and through Puritans’ religion-based discourse asserting freedom of speech in books and sermons and speeches. This is, of course, contrary to the other authors, ancient and modern, who have discussed freedom of speech from a secular perspective based on parrhesia as it appeared in classical literature and other sources. However, those other authors generally underestimated the important role of freedom of speech in Puritan writing and thought and its influence on later English and American assertions of freedom of speech. The Puritan advocates of freedom of speech in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were quite aware of the classical uses of parrhesia – most had received a classical education, a significant portion at Oxford or Cambridge – but they deliberately chose instead to rely on the biblical basis for parrhesia. Their frequent assertions of freedom of speech call into question the contention that "[f]ree speech as we understand the term ... remained nearly unknown to legal or constitutional history and to libertarian thought on either side of the Atlantic before 1776," as Leonard Levy claimed.

The calls for freedom of press in the mid-seventeenth century, like the earlier calls for freedom of speech, also came mostly from devoutly religious people: Puritans and Nonconformists and their religious-based demands. That religious basis was mostly a desire to disseminate religious preaching and knowledge, and an imperative to do that not only by preaching and other speech but by publishing religious books and pamphlets, in addition to a religious basis in freedom of conscience. John Milton, the trailblazer in seeking "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience," tried to extend parrhesia from speech to publications, and built his case in Areopagitica and in other pamphlets on freedom of conscience, on Bible passages, and on similar religious messages. Though Areopagitica is generally described in scholarly literature as unnoticed and overlooked until the end of the seventeenth century, it in fact was relatively widely known, as nearly fifty quotations or allusions show before that century’s end. Besides Milton, other Puritans were the dominant advocates for freedom of press before the end of the seventeenth century, including three who wrote a generation before Milton (an anonymous minister, Leonard Busher, and William Ames), and Levellers and others.

Songwork is central to the project of Elizabethan settler colonialism, with English ballads justifying the violence of conquest and reinforcing the stereotypes of Indigenous “savagery” in the Virginia colony. With the introduction of kidnapped Africans as slaves in 1619, the mysteries of African song become the preoccupation of British commentators, who can make neither head nor tail of it. Music becomes a site of colonial policing with the prohibition of African drumming and the attempted control of song. Yet the songs of the oppressed are not wholly stilled, neither in the fields and praise houses of the African bondspeople, nor in the ballads of indentured servants from the prisons and poorhouses of the British Isles. Meanwhile, on the fringes of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, iconoclast Thomas Morton establishes his Merrymount settlement and infuriates the Puritan elders with his maypole and his bacchanalian ballads, marking perhaps the first instance of secular song as a challenge to the governing establishment. The musical soundscapes of two wars of Puritan conquest – the Pequot War and King Philip’s War – are set against the wars between hymnody and psalmody in the Puritan church. The songs of Bacon’s Rebellion and the poor dragoons of the French and Indian War conclude the chapter.

Moving beyond the familiar focus on the radical puritan reaction, Chapter 3 examines the full range of expressed opposition to the Laudian programme, not just from hard-line puritans, but also from conformists including those in the senior ranks of the Church. These arguments consistently adopted a remarkably conservative mode of defending established orthodoxy in doctrine and practice against recent Laudian innovations, with even puritans invoking the Prayer Book and the 1604 Canons. Even radical presses run by sectarians abroad could juggle with more conservative rhetoric. Most of the arguments of the famous anti-Laudian puritans Henry Burton, John Bastwick and William Prynne still followed more conservative lines (despite the violence of their language) although they radicalised after their punishments. The Scottish opposition to the new Prayer Book, it is argued, was mostly directed against pre-Laudian grievances (with the exception of Robert Baillie’s Ladensium Autokatakrisis which was aimed at English MPs in the Short Parliament). The chapter also analyses the Short Parliament and opposition to the etcetera oath, noting that tactical moderation still meant that the pre-eminent (although not the sole) mode of public debate concerning the Church of England was a conservative one that left the door open for moderate reforms.

The North American region presents a case of multiple rival colonial initiatives intersecting with multiple rival native nations, giving way to settler colonialism under the U.S. in the nineteenth century. Missionaries were active in attempting to eradicate Indian culture and religion, while for some, Christianity provided a place of refuge in the midst of trauma. Dual participation, the compartmentalized practice of both religions, was often the result.

For Puritans living in a “New” England, the promise of Jesus Christ’s return was a source of both dread and hope, a paradox that lay at the heart of their eschatology. In their writings, the end times was figured, by turns, as an epoch unfolding in the churches of New England, a cataclysmic "Day of Doom" and judgment, and a ray of hope for physical and spiritual restoration. Jesus’s words recorded in Matthew 24:42, "Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come," commanded righteous vigilance and detachment from worldly things; they also spurred paranoia and a keen attention to world affairs, especially in Palestine. Though Puritan theologians did not agree on the time, manner, or place of Christ’s return, they imagined a unique role for New England, even if as a "specimen of the new heavens and new earth," as Increase Mather wrote. This essay examines how Puritan writers dramatized and tested these apocalyptic visions in a range of literary forms, from sermons and treatises to epic poetry and meditative verse.

In the wake of 9/11, postsecularism has emerged as a capacious critical perspective that challenges the historical narrative of Enlightenment secularization. Postsecular critique observes the persistence of religion in modernity and connects its persistence to historical religion as a longer and unbroken narrative of national, cultural, and legal discourses. Drawing on intellectual history, the anthropology of religion, and New England colonial historiography, this essay argues that our contemporary understanding of the United States is deepened by rereading the nation’s puritan past from a postsecular perspective. The essay considers the travails of Roger Williams, the Antinomian Controversy, and the puritan treatment of the early Quakers as important contributions to American perspectives on the separation of church and state, the role of spirituality in the secular, and the legal and procedural application of “tolerance.”

Chapter 2 focuses on the local support the three exiles found in their newly adopted communities on the Continent and in particular on the complex religious dimension of their European networks. Ludlow was moving mainly in Reformed Protestant circles, as might be expected from an English Puritan refugee, and Sidney too would seek his associates mainly among Dutch protestants and French Huguenots and former Frondeurs. Yet both Sidney and Neville also spent significant time in Italy, especially in Rome as the centre of the Catholic world. Their networks show that political allegiance could not always be related one-to-one to a specific religious creed and that personal friendships often cut across supposed political and religious divides. However, both Sidney and Neville also pursued a political agenda while in Rome, moving in circles that would allow them to gain insights into the future relations between the Stuart monarchy and the Catholic Church, while also shaping their own journey towards religious toleration.

This chapter demonstrates how New England – an Atlantic region that differed greatly from the Lower South in its origins, climatic characteristics, and demographic make-up – nonetheless found ways to embrace sericulture. The pursuit figured little in corporate or imperial plans, arrived late, and was never really oriented towards export, growing out of the particular preoccupations of a small number of local promoters. But by drawing on the region’s distinctive organisation and networks, considerable progress was made in planting mulberries, and a foundation was laid that would bring rich engagement with silk culture. Through a case study of one particular household’s pursuit of raw silk – that of Rev. Ezra Stiles – we gain access into what Atlantic silk experimentation meant for the many thousands of families who undertook it at one stage or another across the Atlantic world, and the ways in which it affected their domestic spaces and routines. Lastly, although New England silk trials differed in so many respects from others, it was apparent that they nonetheless shared in common an overriding emphasis on the contribution of female labour – something that their more balanced demographics were better able to support than many outposts in the early South.

Already in the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri went straight to the heart of early modern Christianity’s moral conundrum, putting into stark relief its astonishing ethical presumptions regarding salvation and condemnation. He suggests, ominously, that there is a constant potential for epistemic as well as bodily violence in Christian “charity” and notions of “justice” regarding non-Christians who reside far from Europe, although it is unclear in this canto whether the judgment that is supposed to await nonbelievers is to be meted out within the course of history or beyond it.2

Founders of the earliest American colonies considered religious piety an essential civic virtue and therefore continued the tradition of religious establishment found in Britain and other Protestant countries. New sects and denominations (especially Quakers and Baptists) contended against Congregationalist and Anglican establishments throughout the colonies. Though prominent dissenters Roger Williams and William Penn founded colonies respecting religious liberty, the decline of religious establishment elsewhere was owed primarily to changes in British law, commercial and political expediencies necessary for increasingly diverse immigrant populations, and, in the case of Anglican establishments, the difficulty of securing ordination and a self-sustaining parish. Though Roman Catholics enjoyed some degree of toleration, enthusiastic Protestant identity on both sides of the Atlantic further reduced Catholic rights and liberties. Jews enjoyed some limited degree of toleration, but only in a handful of colonies.

This chapter explores Holmes’s emerging theology. Holmes was deeply agnostic; he had a modern and scientific view about the limits of human understanding. At the same time, he was inspired by a spiritual conception of human life. In these views, he was influenced by the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Understanding Holmes’s views thus requires recognizing their connection to Eastern philosophy as well as their origins in New England Puritanism and the Unitarian movement.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was probably not originally composed for a court wedding. Yet, as Janna Segal makes clear, it is very likely that the play was revised for performance at court, and, as such, the play emblematizes the power dynamics at work between the Elizabethan court and theatre companies. Critics concerned with the import of Midsummer’s 'rude mechanicals' (3.2.9) have generally left unattended the relationship between their theatrical practice and antitheatrical discourse. The play’s critical posture towards the antitheatricalist tracts’ characterization of the public theatre as an idle pastime, Segal explains, is first suggested by the presence of the 'mechanicals' (3.2.9) as a 'company' of players (1.2.1). Besides, the players’ recurring anxiety over the effects of their performance on the 'ladies' of Theseus’s court clearly invokes repeated warnings from John Northbrooke, Stephen Gosson, and John Rainoldes that women (especially) are vulnerable at the playhouses. So, more generally speaking, the actors-within-the-action satirically engage with the major criticisms of the public theatre voiced by eminent Puritans.