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BOOK REVIEWS 759 Anglo-Americans Adopted the “Skulking Way of War” Involves Neither Religion Nor Gender but the Introduction

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BOOK REVIEWS 759 Anglo-Americans Adopted the “Skulking Way of War” Involves Neither Religion Nor Gender but the Introduction BOOK REVIEWS 759 Anglo-Americans adopted the “skulking way of war” involves neither religion nor gender but the introduction of European military hard- ware’s killing capacity. Moreover, Romero fails to acknowledge that the dynamics of cultural change did not affect the two parties equally: New Englanders may have added Native maneuvers to their tactical repertoire, but they did not adapt Algonquian technologies en masse, inflect Reformed Protestantism with Native theology, or alter their inherited conceptions of masculinity, while for their part—though traditionalists resisted English religious and gender norms—Indians more readily embraced elements of European technology, and a few did convert. The insights of Romero’s gender analysis do not alter the trajectory of Indian–New English relationships. By 1700, southern New England’s tribes faced a range of choices rendered “increasingly narrow” more by Anglo-American society’s expanding demographic, economic, and technological resources than by its “particular vision of colonial and Christian manliness” (p. 197). Charles L. Cohen is Professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Founding Director of the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions. Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill.By Michael P. Winship. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 340.$49.95.) “Whig history” has long since fallen into disfavor among histori- ans, and few academics today would be willing to laud the New England meetinghouse as a laboratory for American democracy. But, as Michael Winship argues in this deeply researched book, “historiographical excesses” should not be held against the puritans (p. 5). They had strong ideas about church polity, and the settlers of New England did envision their congregations functioning as “little republics” (p. 2). That belief also shaped their view of the political order. The English puritans’ polity was republican in that congregations would elect elders to govern the church. This model stood in stark contrast to the bishop-dominated hierarchy of the Church of England, which remained too “popish” for the puritans’ taste. Winship notes that the puritans’ assumptions of “the dread of the corrupting effects of power, the fear of one-man rule, the emphasis on the consent of the Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00241 by guest on 25 September 2021 760 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY people, and on balanced government” (p. 24) were nearly identical to the hallmarks of classical republicanism. Additionally, many critics be- lieved that the puritans’ explicit condemnation of the rule of Anglican bishops contained an implicit questioning of monarchy as well. Winship insists that the English separatists are more central to this story than others have acknowledged. For him, separatism also originated in a desire to reform the Church of England, and many separatists were not the apocalyptic isolationists portrayed in much of the literature on puritanism. He shows that early puritans fell along a continuum from merely expressing concern about “popish” features of Anglicanism to arguing that the Anglican Church was the Antichrist. A clearer demarcation between Presbyterianism and separatism came decisively with Henry Barrow, the English separatist who directed a radically egalitarian congregationalist critique against elder rule as much as bishop rule. Early puritan hopes for friendly relations with James I crashed into reality when he expelled hundreds of puritan ministers from their parishes in a fit of anti-puritan discipline. Furthermore, anti-Calvinist Anglicans took on a more prominent role in the church. In reaction, some reformers began to envision a brand of congregationalism that would heavily influence the puritans of New England. The noncon- formist William Bradshaw articulated an anti-bishop polity in which congregations (or their elders) would govern themselves with no ec- clesiastical authority standing above them. Trying to convince King James that puritans posed no political threat, however, Bradshaw also conceded a supervisory role for the monarch, whose power would be checked by Parliament. For his part, the congregationalist writer Henry Jacob used the more secular language of “government by con- sent of the people,” arguing that elders and the covenanted members should share power in the church. Winship emphasizes that some separatist exiles in the Netherlands, especially John Robinson’s Leiden congregation, remained committed to reformation and maintained vital relationships with puritans such as William Ames who, when expelled from Cambridge in 1609, fled to the Netherlands and fellowshiped with the Leiden church. Ames clarified the radical puritan view of the Church of England, seeing it as deeply corrupt yet peppered in certain places with covenanted churches of Christ. To him, God really only covenanted with local congregations. As Winship puts it, in Ames’s view, if you “put enough puritans together in a parish where they could worship with some degree of freedom” (p. 98) you had a true church. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00241 by guest on 25 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 761 The Leiden congregation, of course, ultimately found Holland less than ideal for promoting godly reformation, so they pursued settle- ment in the New World. The “merchant adventurers” on whom they depended, however, were more eager to found a puritan colony than a separatist one, so in response the Leiden separatists used their deep familiarity with puritan rhetoric to cast themselves (misleadingly, in Winship’s view) as responsible, innocuous Christians, assiduously avoiding any mention of their view of the Church of England as a false church. This strategy successfully got much of the Leiden congregation to Plymouth, but in the early years of the colony it was badly torn by ecclesiastical squabbling. Nevertheless, Winship argues that the Plymouth separatists strongly influenced the puritan congregation established in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1629 as well as New England congregationalism generally. He vociferously disputes the view of Perry Miller and later historians that the Plymouth church was, in Theodore Dwight Boze- man’s words, “pathetically unimportant.” Instead, Winship makes a strong circumstantial case that overtures from Plymouth leaders helped the Salem church to settle upon de facto separatism. Salem’s minister denied sacraments to arriving English puritans who had worshiped in Anglican parishes, at least until they repented for com- promising with a false church, and the pastor even denied baptism to the child of an immigrant who hailed from the church of the famous puritan (and soon-to-be immigrant) minister John Cotton. These de facto separatist policies became common in early Massachusetts. In the free, isolated environs of New England, puritans found that they could take their godly republicanism to its logical ex- tremes, adopting both egalitarian church government and a broad elective franchise extended to male church members. But, as at Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts puritans feuded over demands to go all the way to rigid separatism, demands made most force- fully by Roger Williams: the puritans should repent, Williams said, for compromises made with the Antichristian English church and state, including the acceptance of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter. The English Civil War—and the short-lived English republic of the 1650s—represented the greatest moment of potential for the in- fluence of Massachusetts congregationalism and godly republicanism. But with the death of Cromwell the republic foundered, and with the Restoration both godly republicanism and congregationalism fell on hard times. Yet Winship believes that the Reformed penchant for Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00241 by guest on 25 September 2021 762 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY republicanism in church and state lingered in New England and bore fruit in new varieties during the American Revolution. Godly Republicanism is a bold, searching, and overdue analysis of the nexus between churchly and political government in puritan thought. With this book, Winship has further secured his reputation as one of this generation’s finest scholars of puritanism. Thomas S. Kidd is Professor of History at Baylor University and the author, most recently, of Patrick Henry: First among Patriots. Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Liter- ature. By Birgit Brander Rasmussen. (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni- versity Press, 2012. Pp. xiv, 208.$84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper.) In this short but interesting book, Birgit Brander Rasmussen documents the presence, persistence, and prominence of indigenous literacies in early American literature. Her assertions—that “the confrontation between European and indigenous peoples in the Americas was often a clash between literate cultures” (pp. 2–3); that “indigenous forms of writing” must be placed “alongside, and in dynamic relation to, more familiar alphabetic texts” (p. 4); that doing so “enable[s] us to imagine a literary tradition rooted in negotiation and dialogues” (p. 9); and that in order to do so, we must develop new “literary methods” of analysis (p. 6)—are all legitimate and significant. Though I do not find the book quite so revolutionary as its author believes it to be, it proves a valuable investigation, one that synthesizes major trends in early American
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