Major topics in American history have a way of resurrecting themselves in new forms. This process is called “historiography.” One topic that was recently resurrected itself in a new stage of its historiography is puritanism. By the 1980s, some critics of Perry Miller and Alan Heimert presumed that puritanism would no longer be considered a significant force in the study of early America. Nevertheless, beginning in the late 1990s, puritanism began to reemerge in a new form. With the work of Francis Bremer and George Marsden, Puritanism—once viewed by Miller as a monolithic force characterized by philosophical unity—became a diversified, transatlantic force.

David A. Weir's Early New England is a major contribution to the new puritan historiography. Chronologically, the study begins in England in the late 1500s and continues into the early 1700s. The work is a close examination of the concept of covenant. Topically, Weir has broadened the parameters of the term to include not only ecclesiastical but also civil institutions. He views a “covenant” as a formulative document resulting in either a civil or ecclesiastical society: “The terms ‘civil covenant’ and ‘church covenant’ refer to written documents that were relatively brief and that spell out the initial vision for a New England community or religious body” (2).

The book begins with a short chapter describing the early European foundations of covenants. In particular, Weir points to the “Separatists” who changed how churches were viewed. As a result of their effort, he states, “Church depended not upon parochial geography but on a covenantal bond rooted in an intense religious experience and a commitment to Protestant doctrine” (19). Weir's analysis begins with the civil covenant. These covenants include the royal charters that established the New England colonies, as well as the covenants granted by the colonial governments to establish the local towns. As Weir carefully reads and categorizes this type of covenant, he notes that there are commonalities among them. He points out that all these documents clearly recognized the civil authorities, and as time went on, the formulation of the civil covenants became more and more a function of the civil magistrates. Furthermore, he finds that “the leaders and the general population moved away from the sense of government as a holy function of God's anointed, and more of a routine matter that needed to be expedited” (131).

The bulk of the narrative of the book is dedicated to the ecclesiastical covenants, that is, those documents that were the foundation of the local churches in various New England colonies. Weir's analysis begins with a very methodical discussion of the covenants used by Puritan and Congregational churches. First, he carefully outlines the various sources that one may look to for the covenants, including the original covenants themselves, minister's records, lay records, records of the renewal of the covenants, and more. Second, he addresses the issue of uniformity or standardization of the covenants by carefully dissecting the covenants. Weir admits that there is a great diversity among the covenants; however, using a close reading analytical approach, he is able to develop a “covenant formulary” (154). But he is quick to point out that how each element of the formulary is composed varies from covenant to covenant.

In the following chapter, Weir deals with the use of covenants among the Dissenting religious sects of colonial New England. In relatively brief fashion, he points out that covenanting was something that was not done by Anglicans and Quakers. It was, however, something that Baptists did employ, but the Baptist covenants were more individualistic and included a dedication to participate in church governance rather than simply to submit to church government.

In his final substantive chapter, Weir attempts to place the covenants within the larger religious history of the period by examining the relationship between the covenants and the major religious statements of the early modern period, such as the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, the Westminster Confession, and the Cambridge Platform. These statements, Weir believes, prompted the New England congregations to propound their own confessional statements, which are most commonly found at the beginning or the end of the covenants. The New England confessional statements were not uniform. The organizational differences between the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, in part, explain this. Furthermore, the statements were also responsive to the emergence of other religious groups of the time, such as Quakers, and to real world interests.

Weir writes: “While there has been some exploration of church covenants in seventeenth-century New England, no systematic, methodical study of the extant church covenants has been attempted, because no systematic, methodical search for these covenant texts had been undertaken” (149). That is, until now! This is an important book not only because of the narrative and the author's interpretations, which I have attempted to summarize above, but more importantly because of the appendices, bibliography, and notes that compose nearly two hundred pages. In the appendices, the author identifies and categorizes over five hundred covenants. His bibliographic essay, encompassing fifty pages, brings together materials from cities and towns from Nova Scotia to Maryland, and the notes to the text comprise another eighty pages. In short, Weir lays out for the reader nearly his entire research upon which the book rests.

The analytical approach that Weir utilizes in his narrative is textually based. He analyzes the text of the documents with great care, but he takes little notice of the historical context of the documents (except for his discussion of the confessional statement). This is not a negative criticism. It is simply a statement of fact that identifies Weir's methodological preference. Nevertheless it is also possible to view this work as both a door opener and a challenge. Weir has given us the raw material to undertake the historical analysis of an essential element in church and community building.