Anne Hutchinson grew up in a Puritan household presided over by her father Francis Marbury (1555–1611). Early on, Marbury appeared in A parte of a register (1593) as a fiery critic of episcopacy. Subsequently, he became a moderate and in 1605 was invited to preach at Paul's Cross. Nothing is known of his daughter Anne's response to her father's politics, but at some point – possibly in the 1620s – ‘being much troubled to see the falseness of the constitution of the church of England’, she declared that she was ‘like to have turned separatist’ (David D. Hall, The Antinomian controversy, 1636–1638: a documentary history, Middletown, Ct 1968, 336) and asked herself ‘who then was [the] antichrist’, a question God ‘by his prophetical office [did] open . . . unto me’. Thereafter, she relied on a ‘voice’ to ‘let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong’ (ibid). Her separatist leanings and the lodestar of a supernatural voice prompted her to distrust the clergy in New England, all of whom, with two or three exceptions, she disparaged for preaching a covenant of works.

After settling in Boston in 1634, where she and her high-status husband joined the town's ‘gathered’ church, she became a spiritual counsellor to women, sometimes to them individually but also sharing her interpretation of what was being said in sermons with several dozen who met weekly in her home; at some point, a meeting for men arose, although Hutchinson would deny speaking to them. By late 1636, when the documentary record begins to thicken, she and John Cotton, who became ‘pastor’ of the Boston church in 1633, were insisting that ‘sanctification’ should not be used as evidence of justification. According to someone sympathetic to her, Hutchinson as counsellor showed ‘women the danger they were in, by trusting to common gifts and graces, without any such witnesse of the Spirit, as the Scripture holds out for a full evidence; whereby many . . . were much humbled thereby, and brought to inquire more after the Lord Jesus Christ, without whom all their gifts . . . would prove but legal’ (p. 263). The deeper source of the crisis that burst upon the colony was Cotton's insistence that repentance under the law – which ministers such as Thomas Hooker and Thomas Shepard regarded as essential – compromised the principle of ‘free grace’. He was also arguing that faith was ‘passive’ at a moment when others were describing it as an ‘instrumental cause’ of justification. What mattered most to him was the priority of the Spirit: the one sure source of assurance was an ‘immediate witness’ or ‘seal’ of the Spirit.

No one in 1630s Massachusetts referred to this message as ‘Antinomianism’, a word enduringly attached to Cotton, Hutchinson and their allies by the London bookseller who published A short story of the rise, reign, and ruine of the late Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines (1644). This fact separates the crisis in mid-1630s Massachusetts from the ‘Antinomianism’ articulated by Tobias Crisp, John Saltmarsh and others in the 1640s. Nor did it replay the ‘Antinomianism’ of the pre-1630s ‘underground’ described by David Como, whose Blown by the spirit: Puritanism and the emergence of an Antinomian underground in pre-Civil War England (2004) is not included in Westerkamp's bibliography, although it lists books by John Easton and Robert Towne. Yet all three had a common thread, a restlessness with certain aspects of the practical divinity.

These theological-pastoral contexts are not what this book is about. Cotton's theologising is never described or his partnership with Hutchinson spelled out. Nor does Westerkamp analyse the errors cited at Hutchinson's church trial in March 1638, errors that included mortalism and other unorthodox fruits of her biblical hermeneutics. At a moment in American scholarship when it seemed important to characterise ‘American’ Puritans as singular, Perry Miller argued in 1943 that Thomas Hooker and his allies in New England created a stage of ‘preparation for salvation’ as a way around the strictures of ‘Calvinism’. Cotton emerged as the hero of Miller's story because he resisted this development. But Miller got it wrong – just how wrong has been widely demonstrated, most recently in Baird Tipson's Hartford Puritanism: the terrifying God of Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone (2015). In recent books, Michael P. Winship and Abram Van Engen have also analysed the theological and biblical contours of the crisis. None the less, ghosts of Miller's argument float through Westerkamp's book, as does the ghost of Bernard Bailyn's argument that ‘merchants’ shared a mindset quite different from that of Winthrop and his fellow Puritans.

Two of the chapters in this book treat, respectively, patriarchialism and the Puritan movement, the first deemed important because Hutchinson withstood the interrogation she underwent in November 1637, the second because Westerkamp argues that, although in general the movement did not make room for the spirituality that ‘charismatic’ women such as Hutchinson were expressing and that Quaker women would embody in the 1650s, a ‘radical wing’ did just this. Patriarchy was certainly a presence in 1637, a patriarchy coexisting with practices and rules that blunted its impact: women petitioned civil governments, joined gathered churches in greater numbers than men, spoke out in church meetings, were treated equally in civil courts and (as widows or otherwise) managed sizeable amounts of property. Adducing cases of women being accused of witchcraft, as Westerkamp does, should be accompanied by references to suits (successful) for defamation and the rallying of other women and some men on behalf of the accused. As historians of women and gender in early modern England have repeatedly pointed out, the patriarchialism endorsed in political theory was never the same as what happened in practice, a point supremely true of early New England. That the Puritan movement or, for that matter, English Protestantism shortchanged women spiritually (and perhaps some men) depends on one's definition of what is meant by that word. That a radical version of the movement prompted women and possibly some men to turn inward to become ‘spiritually empowered’ (p. 151) is superficially plausible. But a ‘heart’-centered inwardness was strongly nurtured within the practical divinity and, for that matter, within English Protestantism more generally. Hence the strength of books such as Kate Narveson's Bible readers and lay writers in early modern England: gender and self-definition in an emergent writing culture (Farnham–Burlington, Vt 2012) and similar studies, although the best retort to Westerkamp's argument may be the letters of Samuel Rutherford. And, as every historian of the Civil War period eventually realises, ‘radical’ is a hydra-headed category.

Intended, it seems, for a popular audience – no references or endnotes accompany an extensive bibliography – this portrait of Hutchinson turns her into a spiritual person whose theologically empty charisma eventually turns her into a victim of other forces, the same scenario that informs Nathaniel Hawthorne's The scarlet letter (1851), which evokes Hutchinson in its opening pages. Another of Westerkamp's storylines concerns John Winthrop – a Winthrop foregrounded in the second paragraph of the book for having written a ‘defensive response to theologians and clerics in Civil War England’ (p. 1) and alluded to a page later, for his ‘enormously skillful manipulations’. Furthermore, the Winthrop in Westerkamp's pages is aggrieved because others won out during the annual election of governor in 1634–6, whereupon he rode the crisis to return to power. Sadly, these assertions are incorrect. Winthrop did not write the Short story, which was assembled as a manuscript well before the coming of civil war to England. Nor did he lead the attack on her. This was the doing of ministers doubly alarmed by the contempt she was expressing toward them and John Cotton's critique of their understanding of assurance and the ‘order’ in which redemption unfolded. Westerkamp wants to rename the controversy ‘Hutchinsonian’ (p. 2), a step in keeping with her neglect of the theological contexts so fully documented in the sermons Cotton and Shepard were preaching during these years and in the back-and-forth among the ministers in texts published in the mid-1640s or from manuscripts in 1968. A more adequate measure of Hutchinson's charisma is that, with the exception of two of her sons, the entire (male) membership of her congregation voted to excommunicate her, and there is nothing to suggest that her visionary capacities gained her a significant audience in Rhode Island, where she went to live. In an essay published after Westerkamp had completed this book (‘Author, Author: the Rise, reign and ruine of the late Antinomians, Familists, and Liberties Reconsidered’, New England Quarterly xciv [2021], 431–581), I describe how this hodge-podge of documents came into being in the 1630s and argue that Thomas Shepard was responsible for two or three of the documents and wrote the narrative passages that link them. As the two major editors of Winthrop's journal have each observed (James Savage in the mid-nineteenth-century, Richard Dunn in the 1990s), Winthrop is subdued in what he says about Hutchinson in his journal.