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techniques that would resurface, if not in precisely the same form, in sentimental fiction. The book’s conclusion traces the significance of sympathy from the Salem witch trials into the new century. In 1692 the issue of fellow feeling once again divided New Englanders, as accused witches’ alleged lack of sympathy for the afflicted proved their guilt. But sympathy as the Puritans understood it would be re-conceptualized in the eighteenth century. It was increasingly regarded as an individual attribute, a sign of refinement instead of grace. And when writers of sentimental literature employed the kinds of emotional tropes visible in Puritan texts, they did so from a secular perspective of which the Puritans would have disapproved. Van Engen has produced a cogently argued and remarkably well- written book that helps those of us who teach about the Puritans explain to students how New Englanders could actually live in such a relentlessly religious society. As with all books that rely so heavily on the analysis of key texts, of course, Sympathetic Puritans reveals more about the ways leaders sought to represent themselves and their society than about the views of the general population, let alone their Native neighbors. Even so, understanding the ideals that informed Puritan leaders’ actions—for good or for ill—remains a worthy en- terprise. With his deft portrayal of the Puritans as warm-blooded individuals with hearts as well as heads, Van Engen invites readers to bestow a little sympathy on people often dismissed as cold and unforgiving.

Virginia DeJohn Anderson is professor of history at the Univer- sity of Colorado, Boulder, and author of Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2004). She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Moses Dunbar, Nathan Hale, and the Tragedy of the American Revolution.

Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Ter- rifying God. By Baird Tipson. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xv, 496.$74.00.) The scholarly literature on Thomas Hooker’s preaching is outdated and often provincial. Baird Tipson in this long, leisurely, and learned “rebranding” of Hooker, as he calls it, brings it up to date. The

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framework he builds for his account is not in the first instance Pu- ritanism, but what he calls extreme Augustinianism, which Tipson defines as “the positions Augustine took in the anti-Pelagian treatises but also to the conclusions, such as double predestination and the irresistibility of divine grace, that some theologians drew from them” (p. 93 n12). Tipson lucidly traces extreme Augustinianism and its opposition from Augustine and Pelagius through Luther and Calvin to Counter- Reformation Catholics and the Protestant Arminius, who drew upon Catholic writings. He ends his historical survey with the famous Pu- ritan theologian William Perkins. Perkins had a huge influence on Hooker, and along with Hooker himself, serves for Tipson as an exemplar of just how extreme extreme Augustinianism could get. Perkins, like almost all Puritans, was a supralapsarian predestinarian, which is to say that his God doomed the vast majority of humanity to hell even before the universe had been created for no other reason than it pleased Him. God cared for humans, as Perkins once put it, no more than humans cared for flies (p. 159). While this terrifying God loved His elect, for Hooker and Perkins, He manifested Himself to them mostly in His wrath and as an unrelenting hater of the sin that still abided in the holiest of His chosen ones. Hooker is well known as a master expositor of Perkins’s “morphol- ogy of conversion.” Tipson in his subtle and acute analysis of Hooker’s preaching on conversion, stresses that this morphology should not be treated overly schematically. Although in theory, conversion had a be- ginning and end, in practice, it was conceived as an ongoing struggle with sin, self-doubt, and God’s wrath with no clear commencement or terminus. Assurance of salvation came, when and if it did, not through positive experiences of God’s love, but through a very slowly developing, reasoned-out trust that constancy in this struggle indi- cated God’s saving hand at work, as various scriptural verses seemed to promise. Hooker’s fellow Hartford minister, Samuel Stone, did not leave much writing behind him and does not take up much space in Hart- ford Puritanism. Stone’s writings emphasize God’s mercy and the mystical mutual love between Christ and his elect. Tipson notes that in these emphases Stone “contrasts startlingly” with Hooker (p. 342). The observation is left dangling. It is one of a number of places where Hartford Puritanism could have usefully made a more sustained ef- fort to discuss Hooker’s piety in relationship to that of his genera- tion of preachers, especially since Tipson often writes as if extreme

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Augustinianism can be reduced entirely to terror, fear, and guilt, in the manner of Hooker. Exemplifying a drastic, not to say heretical alternative to Hooker’s long rough path to assurance of salvation, John Cotton, according to Tipson, advocated assurance via “testimony of the Holy Spirit apart from the word of Scriptures” (p. 362). Tipson then quotes a harsh Hooker attack on Cotton (unnamed) to this effect. But Cotton al- ways argued that the Holy Spirit testified scripturally. He claimed the testimony came via a scriptural verse containing an unconditional promise of salvation that recipients realized was intended for them personally not through reasoning but by the intensity with which it flashed across their minds. For Hooker, that in itself was dangerous nonsense, and from it he inferred the even more dangerous position that he attacked. Hooker tipped his hand by acknowledging that Cot- ton did not advocate “in words” what Hooker accused him of (Hooker, Application of Redemption, pp. 40,cf.43). Inferring the worst from the bad, as Hooker was doing, was a standard seventeenth-century way of attacking an opponent. Tipson suggests that for Hooker the struggle for assurance was al- leviated by membership in a covenanted church. Hooker’s own Hart- ford church did not require applicants to give conversion narratives; it questioned the applicants instead. It was the only New England congregational church known to have done so. Devoting a chapter to Hartford’s admission standards, Tipson argues that the Hartford church’s questions “concentrated on visible sanctity that persisted over time,” rather than probing into intentions and states of mind like the other churches with their conversion narratives (p. 396). But in drawing this conclusion, he may be reading too precipitously Hooker’s published standards, which Tipson acknowledges were “vague,” in light of Stone’s and in spite of their considerable differences (p. 394). Unlike Stone, Hooker claimed that a demonstration of repentance was a requirement for admission while his writings suggest that stiff, intrusive questioning could be used to determine what constituted evidence of true repentance. There is probably good reason that Hooker, again unlike Stone, followed New England convention by using Peter 3:15 as a proof text for admission standards. Lay voices scarcely appear in Hartford Puritanism except as they are mimed in ministerial pronouncements. If they had been added to this discus- sion, they too might have tilted it further away from Stone. Tipson, in the process of emphasizing the alleged non-obtrusiveness of Hart- ford standards, claims that the church’s policy of allowing women

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to testify in private applied to men as well. But that claim requires ignoring what Hooker plainly wrote on the previous page of the cited tract, and Tipson offers no evidence to justify doing so (p. 389). After Hooker’s death, a bitter controversy erupted when Stone vetoed the congregation’s choice of Michael Wigglesworth as his replacement. The clash over Wigglesworth, who endorsed conversion narratives, may have represented a new wrinkle in long standing tensions within the church. Tipson’s arguments, at least in their broad outlines, will perhaps not be new to specialists. But in large measure Tipson is not trying to be new. Rather he is consciously moving Hooker’s writings on practical divinity into the broader currents of recent transatlantic Puritan and early modern theological research. In that he is entirely successful. Tipson may not be plowing many new scholarly furrows, but with his deep knowledge of Hooker and his theological acumen, he plows the old ones more deeply than his predecessors, which is to say that anyone interested in Puritan practical divinity can read Hartford Puritanism with profit. This is an extremely fine-grained, expansive, nuanced study, and should be considered the new baseline for scholarship on Hooker’s preaching.

Michael P. Winship is the E. Merton Coulter Professor in the history department at the University of Georgia. His most recent book is Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Harvard University Press, 2012).

From Androboros to the First Amendment: A History of America’s First Play. By Peter A. Davis. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 222.$60.00 paper.) Peter A. Davis, chair of the Theatre Studies program at the Uni- versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recovers Androboros, A Bo- graphical [sic] Farce in Three Acts, the first play that was both written and performed in America. Rather than expounding on the literary or aesthetic merits of the play (Davis explicitly sets these concerns aside), the author approaches the “script as microhistory,” setting this dramatic text alongside newspaper articles, legal documents, and courtroom transcriptions (p. xix). By merging literary, dramatic, and legal history, Davis illustrates the political struggle for power between church and state officials in New England, and the ways that this

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