“Two Suns in One Firmament”: John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and the 1655 New Haven Sodomy Statute

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 1003-1028
Author(s):  
Sandra Slater
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
The Other ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Sexual Activities ◽  
Legal Code ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Stark Contrast

This piece explores the origins of the anomalous 1655 New Haven statute against sodomy that broke with legal traditions and codes both in England and New England. A lengthy and extraordinarily specific piece of legislation, the New Haven law stands in stark contrast to the minimalist language favored by the English in the early seventeenth century. When viewed within the larger context of clerical animosities, particularly between Thomas Hooker and John Cotton, there is a strong circumstantial case to make for its implementation as an extension of John Cotton's rejected Massachusetts Bay legal code,Moses His Judicials, applied by his friend and admirer John Davenport in New Haven. A devout disciple of John Cotton, John Davenport's New Haven colony relied on Cotton's influence and stood as a rebuke to Thomas Hooker's Connecticut settlements, often criticized as too spiritually lax by those in Massachusetts Bay and New Haven. While seeking to demonstrate greater piety and rigidity, John Cotton and Thomas Hooker sought to exert dominance over the other, with Cotton employing Davenport's colony as an effective castigation of Hooker's perceived liberality. This piece is reflective of trends in studies of sexuality which suggest that ideas and identities related to sexuality do not operate in isolation, but often mirror anxieties not necessarily connected to the regulation of sexual activities. This article situates the 1655 Sodomy Statue within a broader context in order to understand its origins and animosities that potentially motivated its inclusion into the New Haven legal statutes.

Conflicts of Law: Reconsidering the Influence of Religion on Law in Massachusetts Bay

Numen ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dale
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Legal System ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Single Point ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Governing System ◽  
Practical Effect ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Practical Impact

AbstractThe idea that there were different points of view in seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay is not a new one. Several recent studies have undermined Perry Miller's monolithic “Puritan Mind”—demonstrating there were many strands of thought even among the nominally orthodox, and suggesting that we think of the settlers in New England as members of a movement with many ideas, rather than holders of a single point of view.While the idea that there were divisions within the category of Puritan is not a new one, the extent to which that ideological pluralism had a practical impact on the Bay colony's institutions, from its families to its governing system, has not yet been explored. This paper is a preliminary effort to demonstrate how ideological pluralism led to different conceptions of law, and had a practical effect on the legal system developed in the first generation of settlement in Massachusetts Bay.

Building Bensalem at Massachusetts Bay: Francis Bacon and the Wisdom of Eden in Early Modern New England

2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-606
Author(s):  
Zachary Mcleod Hutchins
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Educational Policies ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Religious Leaders

Francis Bacon's influence on seventeenth-century New England has long passed unnoticed, but his plan for the restoration of prelapsarian intellectual perfections guided John Winthrop's initial colonization efforts, shaped New England's educational policies, and had an impact on civic and religious leaders from John Cotton to Jonathan Edwards.

The Social Background of Seventeenth-Century Emigration to America

1979 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Salerno
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Human Migration ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
Basic Facts

Students of twentieth-century migration generally agree that in any analysis of human migration two essential questions must be answered: Who are the migrants? And why did they leave? The questions seem obvious, but as they relate to seventeenth-century emigration to the American colonies, they are difficult to answer with precision. The records cannot be expected to reveal much about the emigrants as persons because they were ordinary people. If they could write—and most could not—the seventeenth-century emigrants left few diaries or letters to aid those who would study their movements. In fact, it is a rather fortunate researcher who uncovers even the few basic facts of their lives in the parish registers of christenings, burials, and marriages.The task of identifying and reconstructing the thoughts and motives of such an anonymous body of people is therefore a formidable one. Those who have pursued the task, first in regard to the so-called “Puritan Hegira” of the 1630s to New England, have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the question of motivation, and have failed to consider who the emigrants were. Only in a recent study of East Anglian and Kentish emigration to Massachusetts Bay in 1637 has there been a systematic analysis of the ordinary settlers. Yet, no attempt has been made either to identify emigrants or to investigate motives behind several considerable movements to America from areas outside East Anglia and southeastern England, thereby to test the various emigration theses based exclusively on those models.

New England

2019 ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
New Haven ◽  
The World ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

This chapter focuses mainly on developments in the law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was founded as a Puritan utopia to display to rest of the world how a society should be governed. Although Massachusetts incorporated elements of the common law into its legal system, the dominant source of law was the word of God. But the divine word, which was enforced by the magistrates of the Court of Assistants, sometimes met resistance from local juries. A major issue throughout the 1630s and 1640s was whether the magistrates or local people would have final authority to determine the substance of the law; the issue was resolved in 1649 by providing for appeals in all cases of judge-jury disagreement to the General Court sitting as a unicameral body in which representatives of localities outnumbered the magistrates and thus had final authority. The chapter ends with a brief look at legal developments in Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, and Rhode Island.

“Such Monstrous Births”: A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy

1985 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Jacobson Schutte
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The Other ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Antinomian Controversy ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Theological Conflict ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The Antinomian controversy of 1636-1638, the earliest major theological conflict in colonial New England, has attracted much scholarly attention. For many, the central figure in the drama, Anne Hutchinson, is a heroine, a champion of religious freedom against the bigoted theocratic Puritan establishment of Massachusetts Bay captained by the elder John Winthrop, Governor of the colony. Others have interpreted the Puritan prosecution of the Antinomians as perhaps regrettable but absolutely necessary; theological splintering might well have led, as most contemporaries believed it would, to a fatal political weakening of the young colony at a critical moment. One feature of the Antinomian episode, however, has not yet received the attention it deserves: the occurrence of two monstrous births, one in the midst of the controversy (although belatedly discovered) and the other at its denouement.

Contested Passages

Memory Lands ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Native People ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Boston Harbor ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony

This chapter examines the area around Boston Harbor and how Algonquians as well as Massachusetts Bay colonists engaged in contestations beginning in the seventeenth century. It begins by unpacking how Wampanoag and Massachusett peoples understood such geographies, including the meanings of rivers, maritime spaces, and islands, drawing upon deep-time oral traditions and archaeology. It then follows the arrival of John Winthrop and Puritans into Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and how that colonial enterprise began to exert pressures on Native people through epidemic disease, land loss, and imbalanced diplomatic relationships. The arrival of Protestant missionaries such as John Eliot also transformed certain Natives’ relationships to kin networks, homelands, and spiritual affiliations. When King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, Christian-affiliated Natives around the “Praying Town” of Natick, situated on the Charles River, were forcibly rounded up and removed from Natick to an incarceration site on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where they suffered large casualties. The chapter tracks how survivors of Deer Island navigated a challenging postwar landscape and rebuilt their lives and communities. It also examines New England forms of commemoration in the seventeenth century onward, including literary as well as physical types of memorialization.

“Why should you be so furious?”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
First Aid ◽  
Global English ◽  
East Indies ◽  
English Identity

Chapter 4 focuses on the representation of Anglo-Dutch relations from Asia to America in the seventeenth century. The chapter analyzes the representation of an incident in 1623 on the spice island Amboyna when Dutch traders tortured (with waterboarding) and killed their English rivals in the East Indies. Decades later, New England writers returning to this incident, treating it as news, invoked anti-English violence half a world away to lay claim to a global English identity. The chapter compares visual representation of the Amboyna incident with John Underhill’s “figure” of the Mystic Fort massacre in New England, arguing that these representations of violence are key elements of colonial fantasies that made (and make) real atrocities possible. The coda discusses Stephen Bradwell’s 1633 first-aid manual, partly inspired by the Amboyna incident, which maintains that properly trained, authorized metropolitan authorities can control the potential dangers of the remedies torture and tobacco.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

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