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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| David A. Weir. Early New England: A Covenanted Society. (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion.) Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans. 2005. Pp. xviii, 460. $34.00.
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| As he was preparing a previous book, The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought (1990), David A. Weir began to compile a list of every covenant enacted by a New England congregation in the seventeenth century, eventually doing the same for patents or covenants employed by civil governments in the same region. The fruits of this research comprise the heart of his new book: a checklist of all such covenants, civil or church-related, as these were enacted between 1620 and 1708 in New England, as well as in the communities founded by like-minded immigrants in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. A bibliographical essay and extensive endnotes, many of them citing the work of other scholars, take up the final 135 pages. As Weir points out, the information he has brought together in one place is scattered through a host of records, published and unpublished. His, then, is more a book of reference than it is a work of narrative or interpretive history; and although some of the bibliographical materials can be found elsewhere, especially in the thirteen-volume New England Bibliography (1976–2003), Weir has done us all a service in making so much information available in a single place. |
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