Uncovering the experiences of women and men from the church and court disciplinary records of colonial Massachusetts between 1630 and 1725, Fitzgerald has produced an original and compelling contribution to the history of religion and society in early America. Recognising an opportunity in the field for further study of gender, church membership and discipline, the monograph emphasises a key tension between prescribed ‘feminized piety’ (p. 44) and the preoccupations of colonial men who resisted this model. Laymen involved in church discipline distinguished between the interior experiences of women and the outward responsibilities of men in order to preserve ‘public masculinity’, a process that in turn ‘gendered souls, sins, and censure practices’ (p. 45). Deftly tracing these developments, Fitzgerald undertakes a comparative analysis of gender in censure cases across three generations of colonial life.

The strategic decision to deploy these parameters allows Fitzgerald to illuminate commonalities between communities in the region, as well as to chart religious and social change over time. In the first generation, ministers emphasised personal spirituality and the duties of the community, ideals that were gradually ascribed to women and men respectively as disciplinary processes proliferated through the second generation. By the third generation, increasingly gendered conceptions of religious identity demanded of women an interiorised spirituality concerned with the body, inner corruption and sinfulness, while linking male religiosity with behaviour, outward conduct and civic participation. These processes intersected with embryonic shifts towards ‘public/private or separate-spheres modern gender ideology’ (p. 65). A particularly perceptive focus on the language of censure cases and individual confessions effectively reveals the gendered expectations of ministerial authorities. Negotiating disciplinary procedures required culpable individuals to reaffirm ideals associated with femininity or masculinity while simultaneously offering gendered expressions of remorse. Several tables provide supplementary evidence of patterns in reported behaviour, disciplinary responses to confessions and the proliferation of gendered language.

Each focusing on a particular case study from the mid-seventeenth century, the fourth and fifth chapters highlight striking efforts to negotiate these processes. The fourth chapter investigates a prominent military captain, John Underhill, who resorted to a ‘feminized language’ (p. 111) of confession to perform appropriate contrition, seek forgiveness and overturn his banishment. The fifth chapter reconstructs the experience of an astute and defiant merchant's wife, Ann Hibbens, whose trespasses onto the masculine terrain of business and finance amounted to an abdication of her femininity, leaving her vulnerable to long-lasting reputational damage and, ultimately, fatal punishment. Concluding the monograph, Fitzgerald considers whether Puritan colonists might have taken a different path, one that could have led to different – and perhaps more egalitarian – conceptions of gender and church discipline (p. 141). From the religious controversies of early Massachusetts, alternative structures and practices did emerge, notably in neighbouring Providence, Rhode Island, formed in 1636 near the beginning of Fitzgerald's chronology. Some reflections on the evolution of Separatist efforts in this region to reconcile a pluralistic emphasis on religious conscience with gendered approaches to social order and discipline might have further enriched the monograph's fascinating and timely interpretation of gender and power.