| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 278 words from this article are provided below; about 547 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Louise A. Breen. Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692. (Religion in America Series.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. vi, 292. $45.00.

In this book, Louise A. Breen offers a binary interpretation of seventeenth-century Massachusetts culture. According to Breen, Massachusetts's elite was divided into "opposing factions, insisting on the one hand on isolation from [the outside] world and on the other on involvement in its growing diversity." This division was "fixed during the antinomian controversy [of the late 1630s]" (p. 9) Massachusetts's transatlantically oriented merchants, centered in Boston, had a sense of the market as boundless and irrational, according to Breen. That sense made them sympathetic, to varying degrees, to antinomianism in the 1630s, which, by Breen's reading, strongly encouraged toleration and private, subjective spirituality. But by 1638, the other faction, the "orthodox" party, had established its dominance over the "antinomians" and "specifically mandated" "the predilection for isolationism and the fear of transatlantic projects" that, according to Breen, predominated in Massachusetts for the rest of the century (p. 143). 1

This outcome pleased ordinary colonists, for whom, like the merchants, economic and religious preferences went hand in hand; they "were content with orthodoxy because they were satisfied with modest gains in their economic and spiritual lives, so long as such small gains were widely accessible and relatively evenly distributed" (p. 54). Orthodoxy, with its communally verifiable and accessible standards of visible holiness, reinforced local communities and provided them a "comforting sense of stability" (p. 55) However, this provincial orthodox center and the transatlantic-oriented elite dissenters continued to clash throughout the century. . . .

There are about 547 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.