Politics in the Archives: Records, Property, and Plantation Politics in Massachusetts Bay, 1642-1650

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Beaver
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Land Law ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Face

AbstractThis essay concerns the permutations of English popular politics in its seventeenth-century Atlantic setting, using the record of local and individual experience of politics to examine the process whereby settlers took possession of land in Massachusetts Bay. Historians have long appreciated the importance of English local customs in the early North American settlements, but the explicit political significance of English corporate and manorial approaches to land law in these settlements, and in the expansion of the Massachusetts Bay regime during the 1640s, have not been properly understood. The essay's perspective is microhistorical, developing its case from Obadiah Bruen's detailed "town book" of the Gloucester plantation: the book that he kept as the settlement's recorder between 1642 and 1650. The plantation occupied a key set of coordinates at the junction of English popular politics and religion and the building of the Massachusetts Bay colony during the 1640s. Using a close reading of Bruen's text, the essay identifies a politics of land possession, fashioned from traditional English political forms and their uses of land law, that sustained the Gloucester plantation, much like the colony as a whole, through a decade of bitter internal divisions. In the face of religious conflict and the myriad difficulties of building a new regime, political order came to depend, in Gloucester as in Massachusetts Bay generally, on the power to convey secure title to the possession of land, a power enshrined in the routine administrative records of local notaries or recorders, officially required in each Massachusetts Bay township during the 1640s.

“The Most Glorious Church in the World”: The Unity of the Godly in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1630s

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Winship
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Antinomian Controversy ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Government

The dominant historiographical trend in Puritan studies, started by Patrick Collinson, stresses the conservative nature of Puritanism. It notes Puritanism's strong opposition to the separatist impulses of some of the godly and the ways in which it was successfully integrated into the Church of England until the innovations of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Far from being revolutionary, Puritanism was able to contain the disruptive energies of the Reformation within a national church structure. This picture dovetails nicely with the revisionist portrayal of an early seventeenth-century “Unrevolutionary England,” but it sits uneasily with the fratricidal cacophony of 1640s Puritanism.The picture also sits uneasily with the Antinomian Controversy, the greatest internal dispute of pre-civil wars Puritanism. That controversy shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Accusations of false doctrine flew back and forth, the government went into tumult, and by the time the crisis had subsided, leading colonists had voluntarily departed or had been banished. In terms of its cultural impact in England, it was probably the single most important event in seventeenth-century American colonial history; publications generated by the controversy were reprinted in England into the nineteenth century.The Antinomian Controversy, evoking civil wars cacophony but occurring in the previous decade, offers a bridge across the current interpretive chasm between civil wars and pre-civil wars Puritanism. The crisis has generated a wide range of scholarly interpretations, but there is broad agreement that the Boston church, storm center of the crisis, was the source of its disruption.

Two Seventeenth-Century Conversion Narratives from Ipswich, Massachusetts Bay Colony

2009 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Strong
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Conversion Narratives ◽  
Spiritual Autobiographies ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
Spiritual Struggles

Two extraordinarily rare documents, the seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographies of William and Elisabeth Adams, residents of Ipswich, Massachusetts Bay Colony, are here introduced, transcribed, and annotated. So intense were the couple's spiritual struggles that, at one point, William fears that he might “cut the throat of my own soul.”

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.

Un/re/production of Old Age inThe Taking of Deborah Logan

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-194
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kotwasińska
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
The Face ◽  
Female Embodiment ◽  
Main Protagonist

The article offers a re-examination of abjected femininity and old age through a close reading of The Taking of Deborah Logan (2015), a found footage horror movie centered on spectral possession. While to a large extent the movie replicates an infamous monstrous old woman trope, it also effectively questions typical Alzheimer's disease (AD) narratives, which tend to portray life with AD as a story of unmitigated loss and debility. In The Taking of Deborah Logan, potentially destabilizing moments occur when in the face of progressive loss of control, memory, and bodily functions, the main protagonist is momentarily experienced as resisting the dehumanisation and loss of agency conventionally associated with AD and possession alike. The aim of this article is thus three-fold. The first part sketches the processes through which possession narratives generate a highly ambivalent space for aging femininity in horror film, and how aging, disability, and AD intersect both in popular understanding and in film. In the second part, the author examines how The Taking of Deborah Logan, as a found footage horror, shapes a discussion about selfhood, agency, and monstrous embodiment. Finally, the author argues that it is through the concept of transaging that one can find ways to destabilise traditional understandings of old age, female embodiment, and AD, and offer new narratives that highlight monstrous, if ambivalent, agency.

The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Introductory Overview ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
The Face ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

Francis of Assisi’s reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is often considered to be the first account of an individual receiving the five wounds of Christ. The thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—I bear the stigmata of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since late antiquity. These works explained stigmata as wounds that martyrs received, like the apostle Paul, in their attempt to spread Christianity in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, stigmata were described as marks of Christ that priests received invisibly at their ordination. In the eleventh century, monks and nuns were perceived as bearing the stigmata in so far as they lived a life of renunciation out of love for Christ. By the later Middle Ages holy women like Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) were more frequently described as having stigmata than their male counterparts. With the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the way stigmata were defined reflected the diverse perceptions of Christianity held by Catholics and Protestants. This study traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata as expressed in theological discussions and devotional practices in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. It also contains an introductory overview of the historiography of religious stigmata beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century to its treatment and assessment in the twenty-first century.

The Rise and Fall of the Province of Lygonia, 1643–1658

2009 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 490-513
Author(s):  
Hannah Farber
Keyword(s):  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Legal Standing ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony

During the 1640s, George Cleeve and Thomas Morton carved the province of Lygonia out of Ferdinando Gorges' Maine. Cleeve believed Lygonia's legitimacy was guaranteed by its legal standing and by the authority of its Parliamentarian proprietor, but he could not stop Lygonian towns from opting to join the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1658.

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.

Childhood in the Early Colonial Period

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-73
Author(s):  
Harry Bloch
Keyword(s):  
Child Labor ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Child Life ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Plymouth Colony ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Poor Children

A great deal has been written about the life, struggles, and accomplishments of pioneer men and women who crossed the ocean to build a new world in the wilderness; but infant and child life during early colonial days is largely hidden in obscurity. Little has been recorded.1 It is known that few children under the age of 7 survived in the crowded immigrant ships: falling into the sea, accidents, hunger, thirst, and sickness took its sad toll. Nevertheless, there were many young2-5: a third of the founders of Plymouth were children; Puritan youth were evident in the great migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony; several cargoes of poor children and orphans from Dutch almshouses were "bound out" to the burghers of New Netherlands; children were frequently dispatched from England as indentured servants and apprentices; the London Company sent 100 children to Virginia in 1619, and 1,500, kidnapped from Ireland and England, in 1627; African slave children were shipped to the colonies after 1620; and the colonial mother6 bore many children, buried many, and often followed them to the grave at an early age. Fecundity,5 characteristic of early colonists, served to people a continent (the population was 2.5 million in 1776), and provided needed child labor. Over 50% of Plymouth colony consisted of children.7 Colonial children were viewed as miniature adults; and boys and girls were dressed alike until the age of 7.1,7,8 The infant1,7 wore a long linen smock; was covered with a woolen blanket; and a wooden or wicker cradle, hooded to protect from cold draughts, much like those in which Indian babies slept, was its bed.

World Literature as a Speculative Literary Totality: Veselovsky, Auerbach, Said, and the Critical-Humanist Tradition

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-251
Author(s):  
Ben Etherington
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
The Face ◽  
Humanist Tradition ◽  
Literary Experience

Abstract This essay revisits critical-humanist approaches to literary totality that have largely been sidelined during the recent revival of world literature studies. While there has been no shortage of defenses of close reading in the face of distant reading and other positivist approaches, this essay argues that it is precisely the hermeneutic attention to particular works that has allowed critical humanists to think about literary practice within the most encompassing purview. For those in this tradition, “world literature” can never be a stable object but is a speculative totality. The essay discusses three exemplary critical concepts that assume a speculative epistemology of literary totality: Alexander Veselovsky’s “historical poetics,” Erich Auerbach’s “Ansatzpunkt,” and Edward Said’s “contrapuntal reading.” Each, it is argued, is grounded in the distinctive qualities of literary experience, a claim for which Theodor Adorno’s account of speculative thinking serves as a basis.

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