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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eve LaPlante
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August 23 - September 10, 2020
the seventeenth-century English world was based on the Julian calendar, created in 45 BCE by Julius Caesar, rather than on the modern Gregorian calendar, created by Pope Gregory in the late sixteenth century. England and its colonies maintained the old calendar (and its use of March 25 rather than January 1 as the start of a new year) until 1752 as a way of avoiding the innovations of a pope.
In a world without religious freedom, civil rights, or free speech—the colonial world of the 1630s that was the seed of the modern United States—Anne Hutchinson was an American visionary, pioneer, and explorer who epitomized the religious freedom and tolerance that are essential to the nation’s character.
Hutchinson is a classic rebel’s rebel, revealing how quickly outsiders can become authoritarians.
Hutchinson haunted Nathaniel Hawthorne, who used her as a model for Hester Prynne, the adulterous heroine of The Scarlet Letter.
A woman who wielded public power in a culture suspicious of such power, she exemplifies why there are so few women, even today, in American politics, and why no woman has attained the presidency.
To me, though, Anne Hutchinson was most compelling on account of her vehemence, her familiarity, and her violent death.
Always an iconoclast, she had long opposed English settlers’ efforts to vanquish Indian tribes.
colonial leaders founded Harvard to indoctrinate young male citizens so as to prevent a charismatic radical like Hutchinson from ever again holding sway in Massachusetts,
Anne Hutchinson had “stepped out of [her] place,” in the succinct phrase of the Reverend Hugh Peter, of Salem—she “had rather been a husband than a wife; and a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject.”
Colonial ministers, despite their vast public power, were not allowed to hold public office, a distinction that kept Massachusetts from being a theocracy.
Massachusetts had fought and won the Pequot War, their first campaign against the natives, on the coast of what would become Connecticut. That war had ended in July with the massacre by colonial soldiers of almost every Pequot man, woman, and child—a “divine slaughter,” in the words of the Cambridge pastor Thomas Shepard,
Hutchinson “did conceive that we were not able ministers of the gospel,” the Salem minister Hugh Peter lamented. In sum, “she was a woman not only difficult in her opinions, but also of an intemperate spirit.”
since the voting age had been lowered to sixteen, boys of fourteen and fifteen were also permitted to vote.
English Puritanism, which began in the late 1550s, was a Reformed sect aimed at further ridding the English church of Catholic tendencies and practices.
Puritans themselves rejected the “vile” term Puritan, seeing themselves as “nonconformists” or “true” Anglicans,
The Puritans shrank the number of sacraments from seven to two or three, leaving only baptism, communion, and sometimes marriage.
When Luther and Zwingli, both Catholic clergymen, discarded their collars and took wives, they ended the special status of the Catholic priest as a vessel through which God gives humanity divine grace.
In 1580, when he was twenty-five, the Reverend Francis Marbury was released from prison for the third time.
King James I ordered in 1603 that every English church should have a pulpit, to bring the priest closer to the people.
One of Marbury’s students, a John Smith of nearby Willoughby, born in 1579, would become Captain John Smith and found the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, and chart the coastline of New England.
Some suspected him of authoring the Marprelate Tracts, satiric diatribes against Catholic tendencies in the Church of England that were published in London in 1588 and 1589 under the pseudonym “Martin Marprelate.” There is no evidence linking Marbury to these tracts, for which the printer, the only known culprit, was executed in 1593.
This general wish for silence from women extended also into the courtroom, as Winthrop had earlier explained to Hutchinson: “We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex.”
They inhabited the New Israel, which was chosen by God, and saw themselves as “the people of God,” like the biblical Jews.
These religious discussions, sometimes called “gossipings,” grew out of the ban on women participating in any activities at church. Women were barred not only from the ministry but also from voting on church membership, participating in services, and talking in the church.
as she well knew, a Puritan can never completely abandon doubt, for that alone is a sign that one is not saved.
Dudley’s choice of the word potent underscores his point, for in the lexicon of a seventeenth-century Englishman this masculine term could not properly be applied to any woman.
If a woman has no public power, she suggested, then she cannot be condemned for private opinions and acts. It was a good argument. No one knew if it would succeed.
As the daughter of a minister who considered most ministers poorly trained to preach, she felt little compunction about challenging the erudition of any divine.
As a rule, the settlers went to bed early, often by eight, and rose by daybreak.
Many of the native Indians, who had cleared much land for planting, had died in recent years of smallpox, which English fishermen had imported to America earlier in the century. Some later English émigrés saw this double “clearing” of the land as a benefice.
A wild pigeon landed on the boat’s deck just before the passengers rowed ashore, as if the Holy Spirit were blessing the fleet and its mission.
most Puritans, the Roman Catholic Church was the reincarnation of the biblical Whore of Babylon.
The culminating bachelor of divinity degree, which required five years of Hebrew, theology, disputation, and preaching,
The parish of Boston was England’s largest, making it a plum assignment for a newly minted vicar. The town’s name is a shortened version of “Botolph’s Stone,” the medieval name for its earliest church, founded by Saint Botolph, an Anglo-Saxon monk, in the seventh century.
he acquired (in the parlance of the day) a wife—Elizabeth Horrocks, of a nonconformist family—something every Puritan preacher was expected to do, in part to distinguish himself from a Catholic priest.
Cotton’s emphasis on the individual’s inability to achieve salvation echoed the pervasive inability of women to achieve public recognition.
English common law allowed a midwife to bury a dead baby in private, as long as “neither hog nor dog nor any other beast come into it,” but the Massachusetts court had forbidden this practice as a way of preventing attempts at abortion.
In 1622 the hierarchy in London banned the nonconformist sermon practice of applying Scripture passages to modern times.
Practically every historical document of the period was written by a man, quoting his or another man’s words. In the paper record of early America, it is almost as though women did not exist.
numerous Puritan divines—the word is from the Latin for “soothsayer” or “prophet”—felt certain that the world as they knew it was about to come to some apocalyptic end. But Hutchinson was not a divine, for no woman could be.
At least a hundred English settlers were convicted of or charged with witchcraft before 1690.
Inadvertent midwife to a college founded in part to protect posterity from her errors, Anne Marbury Hutchinson, ironically, would be more at home at Harvard today than any of her critics.
A theater, to a Puritan, was a monument to folly, a den of iniquity, and a hotbed of drunkenness, prostitution, and the heresies uttered on the stage.
In seventeenth-century England, it was a truth universally acknowledged that conception cannot occur if the woman does not “delight in the acting thereof.”
“the absence of children called into question the character of a marriage and, in particular, the husband’s ability to satisfy his wife sexually.”
A family named Brader suffered six deaths in twelve midsummer days: two daughters on July 24, the father the next day, and then three sons, on July 29, August 3, and August 4.
“For even the wealthiest,” according to Larzer Ziff, “a day in the Massachusetts Bay settlement was a day of toil.”
The settlers chose not to re-create here many aspects of life that “were commonplace in much of Europe,”
The driver, she observed, kept a gun at his feet, as required by the March 1637 decree aimed at protecting the colonists from the natives.
Even the Reverend John Cotton, who in 1630 at Southampton wharf had admonished the settlers of Massachusetts Bay to “feed the natives with your spirituals,” came after a few years in America to a much altered opinion of its native people: “Blast all their green groves and arbors.”
