Reviewed by Marjoleine Kars | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3

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Reviewed by Marjoleine Kars | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives: Free Will Christian Women in Colonial Maryland. By Debra Meyers. Religion in North America. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 249. $39.95.) Reviewed by Marjoleine Kars , University of Maryland, Baltimore County
How people imagined that they would gain salvation had a major impact on gender relations and family formation in seventeenth-century Maryland, argues Debra Meyers. Founded in 1634, Maryland quickly attracted a range of religious groups, among them Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Puritans. Although previous historians have often emphasized the antagonisms among these different denominations, Meyers suggests that Maryland's climate of religious tolerance allowed people of different denominations to live and work together. Yet there was an important difference among these groups. "Simply put," she asserts, "a believer's notions concerning how and under what circumstances he or she would gain eternal salvation were frequently connected to provincial architecture, burial rituals, inheritance practices, marriage customs, and the role English women were permitted to play in the public and private spheres during the seventeenth century" (p. 3). On the basis of soteriology, then, Meyers divides seventeenth-century Maryland Christians into two categories, Predestinarians and Free Will Christians.	1
The Predestinarians, who were Calvinists, believed that God decided one's salvation even before birth; hence, human efforts to earn salvation were useless. Leading a godly life might be a sign of salvation, but it could not obtain salvation. Among the Predestinarians, Meyers places Puritans, Particular Baptists, and Presbyterians. The Free Will Christians, who believed that they had a role to play in achieving salvation through faith and good works, consisted of Roman Catholics, Arminian (as opposed to Calvinist) Anglicans, and Quakers. Free Will Christians, in believing that any "person could choose to work for eternal salvation tended to place women on a more level playing field with their male kinfolk" than did Predestinarians, who saw women as more prone to evil (p. 5). Free Will Christians "exalted womanhood," Meyers concludes boldly (p. 5). Much of the book is devoted to asserting the logic of these analytic groups and their connection to views about gender.	2
Despite important differences among Free Will Christians and the fact that they "did not readily acknowledge their shared religiosity" (pp. 98–99), Meyers claims they shared attitudes toward marriage and separation, parent-child relationships, and patterns of partner selection as well as an emphasis on church services in which one's experience of God, rather than Scripture, took center stage. They were uncertain of their salvation and thus in their wills begged for forgiveness of their sins and hoped that Jesus Christ would intercede on their behalf. Lastly, "all three Free Will Christian groups in Maryland constructed church hierarchies in which religious authority primarily rested within a small group of supreme priests or ministers" (p. 99).	. . .

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