| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Francis J. Bremer and Lynn A. Botelho, editors. The World of John Winthrop: Essays on England and New England, 1588–1649. (Massachusetts Historical Society Studies in American History and Culture, number 9.) Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society. 2005. Pp. viii, 408. $50.00.
This is the third major collection edited or coedited by Francis J. Bremer that explores the world of the New England Puritans. Comparing the three books reveals how that world has been conceived, and how it is being rethought. Back in 1977, Bremer and Alden Vaughan compiled an anthology of previously published articles entitled Puritan New England: Essays on Religion, Society, and Culture. The essays were thematically wide ranging, but as the title suggests, most were focused intently inward, on New England itself. Several, however, sketched out the English background of American Puritanism. As Bremer reminds us in the introduction to his latest collection, the new Atlantic history is not nearly as novel as its practitioners claim. The leading historians of New England Puritanism, from Samuel Eliot Morison and Perry Miller onward, always knew that the European and English context was indispensable for understanding their subject. Yet many scholars have taken a more parochial approach. Bremer's 1993 collection, Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, was "transatlantic" in the sense that it included essays on English Puritanism and essays on New England, but most were rooted on one side of the ocean or the other. Only in this latest book, coedited with Lynn A. Botelho, do we see the triumph of a truly Atlantic approach. It is about John Winthrop's world rather than the man himself (the subject of a major biography by Bremer), and it is appropriately expansive in its range. Nearly all of the chapters encompass England and New England, and some draw in Scotland and Ireland, Virginia and the Caribbean. In two cases, this happens because a historian of early modern England is paired with a historian of New England, while in others individual scholars navigate confidently between the old world and the new. The result is a book that emphasizes how much the Puritan colonists owed to England, while throwing into high relief the things that made New England distinctive.	1
The collection is thematically broad, including essays on race and ethnicity, piety, economic ethics, government, law and political thought, gender, and print culture. Inevitably, there are gaps. Identity is a major theme of the volume, and the reader comes away with a strong sense of the English identity of Winthrop and his contemporaries. But there is relatively little on their sense of belonging to an international community of reformed churches. The Thirty Years' War, John Calvin, and Latin texts are mentioned in passing, but their profile is lower here than it was in the mind of Winthrop.	2
Yet in all sorts of ways, the collection extends our horizons and questions our settled assumptions. Three essays provide alternative perspectives on English or Puritan identity. Vaughan has been working on Puritans and Native Americans for forty years, but in this wide-ranging new essay on "England's 'Others' in the Old and New Worlds," he and Virginia Vaughan place the Indian-English relationship into a much broader framework. They show how the ethnocentric English defined themselves over against the Irish, the Welsh, the Spanish, the Indians, the Turks, the Jews, and the Africans. While Puritans showed a greater concern for the reformation of the "Other," they shared common English prejudices and "largely defined themselves in contrast to whom they were not" (p. 61). Tom Webster concurs in emphasizing the adversarial nature of Puritan identity formation. His essay on the internal dichotomies in devotional writing builds on the work of Patrick Collinson to argue that the godly needed a perceived enemy to bolster their own sense of self. Mark Peterson, by contrast, suggests that while New England Puritans were riven by internal disputes, they did not need external antagonism to preserve piety. Indeed, Winthrop recreated in Massachusetts the sheltered godly enclave that had been disrupted by Laudian intervention in the Stour valley.	. . .

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