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.