The Passion of Anne Hutchinson

Marilyn J. Westerkamp’s final paragraph in The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: An Extraordinary Woman, the Puritan Patriarchs, and the World They Made and Lost wisely dismisses the common ideological uses of her legacy: “Anne Hutchinson was not a proto-feminist, a political dissident, colonial reformer, certainly not a suffragette” (234).  Rather, she embodied the “mystical counterpoint to the emphasis on learning” in Puritanism (114), not an alien threat but a prophetic spiritual voice rising from within. Nevertheless, as Westerkamp recounts, Hutchinson was rebuked and banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1630s for stepping out of her place as a woman by speaking at religious meetings that included men, for empowering a faction in Boston that posed an immediate political threat to the civil and religious order, and for inspiring an understanding of the colony’s purpose that would overturn the covenantal vision of the founding magistrates and ministers. Westerkamp’s feminist analysis furthers our understanding of this significant figure in early New England history.

Westerkamp aims to uncover the secret to Hutchinson’s remarkable spiritual authority and persuasive power and to explain why, as a woman, she was treated so severely. The book, as she writes in the acknowledgments, “has been at the center of my intellectual world” for many years (ix). Indeed, work on this iconic early New England prophetess goes back at least to her 1990 article in Church History, “Anne Hutchinson, Sectarian Mysticism, and the Puritan Order.”

One of Westerkamp’s overarching themes is that New England Puritanism was still in such religious flux in the early years of settlement that hyper-spiritual understandings of how God’s grace operated, free of any human influence, were within the bounds of theological discussion. John Cotton’s pastoral support of Hutchinson’s lay ministry through most of the controversy, and his tense relationship with clergy who had been denounced by Hutchinson for preaching a false gospel of works righteousness, lend support to this interpretation.

But Westerkamp overstates differences between ministers like Thomas Hooker and John Davenport, who left for Hartford and New Haven, and their colleagues in Massachusetts. They certainly cannot be lumped with Roger Williams as dissenters. Hooker, after all, moderated the synod that condemned Hutchinson for her theological errors. Westerkamp is mistaken in arguing that it was Hutchinson’s challenge that forced the ministers to firm up their theology. As Baird Tipson shows in Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying God (Oxford, 2015)—an important book not included in her bibliography—Hooker “did not ‘harden’ his positions in reaction to those of John Cotton and the Antinomians” (20). His theology, in line with the doctrinal positions of other clergy and Hutchinson herself, was already well-developed in England.

In this regard, it is odd that, in her chapters on “Sectarian Mysticism and Spiritual Power” and “Prophesying Women and Gifts of the Spirit,” Westerkamp also fails to cite David Como’s significant study, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Oxford, 2004). According to Como, Westerkamp has it backward. The kind of hyper-spiritual theology Anne Hutchinson carried with her from England was itself a reaction to “dissatisfaction with the [perceived] strenuous, unforgiving nature of mainstream puritan piety” (37). Westerkamp effectively shows that the Hutchinsonian controversy resulted from the tension between Puritanism’s twin poles of biblical-theological learning and immediate spiritual experience, but her failure to reckon with recent scholarship is perplexing.

Westerkamp’s feminist framework understandably minimizes the importance of doctrinal differences in fomenting the crisis. Based on her analysis of women in Puritanism and English society, ranging from everyday life to the gendering of witchcraft, she concludes that it was Hutchinson’s “femaleness” that “threatened the basic order of society” (57). She presents a gender-driven narrative of the vain attempt to hold together the polarizing impulses of patriarchal authority in both civil and ecclesial realms on one hand and spiritual yearning of the feminine soul (of both men and women) as bride of Christ on the other. Further, based on the Genesis account of the Fall, women were believed to be not merely weak but “in essence, evil, or at least burdened with a congenital inclination toward evil” (111). Thus, “Hutchinson’s rising influence and power did not bring social and political chaos” to New England. Rather, the conflict was already “inherent within a culture that considered women an inferior class of humanity and yet had space for a prophesying female” (106). This is a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of gender in the Hutchinson controversy.

There is no doubt that Hutchinson’s subversive power as a woman, as her influence among merchants and other leading men moved beyond home meetings into the public sphere, was a major factor in her excommunication and banishment. Her gender severely aggravated the fact that she and her male and female followers aggressively rejected the founders’ reformed doctrine and practical divinity.  More attention to these differences would have made for a more nuanced interpretation. Westerkamp does note that with their  theologically based communal vision, “clergy were probably more willing to tolerate differences in religious style and theological emphasis” than were Anne Hutchinson and her followers, as they “attempted several times, with varying degrees of success, to put the disputes behind them” (55).

Finally, Westerkamp’s conclusion that “the Puritan patriarchs destroyed their own world when they destroyed her” (234) does not apply to the spirituality that was at the root of puritanism. Contrary to her assumption, the lay-led home and neighborhood religious meetings for which Hutchinson was famous did not go away. Nor did the affective or “mystical” side of Puritanism. John Winthrop, not self-assured but humbled in the wake of the controversy, confessed in his journal his need to renew a deeper spiritual experience. And how else can one explain, for example, Edward Taylor’s erotically tinged meditative poetry in the 1680s or, a century after Hutchinson, the “heavenly elysium” of Sarah Edwards?

Charles Hambrick-Stowe is an independent scholar.

Charles Hambrick-Stowe

Date Of Review:

September 30, 2023