Reviewed by Michael McGiffert | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Michael McGiffert | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Michael McGiffert, Williamsburg, Virginia

Early New England: A Covenanted Society. By David A. Weir. Emory University Studies in Law and Religion. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005. 478 pages. $34.00 (paper).
David A. Weir has performed an estimable service to students of New England's early history. His book makes as full a survey as can be made of the region's colonies, towns, and churches at their point of legal or corporate origin, when men (I use the word advisedly) put heads and hands together to create systems of authority by means of covenants pledged and recorded. Weir claims to have "systematically examined the formation of every civil and religious institution founded in New England before 1708" (3). The claim is grandly borne out by the comprehensive scope of Early New England.	1
Under the rubric of founding covenants, Weir surveys in succession the English colonial charters, New England's town covenants, and two sets of church covenants—those of the Congregational Standing Order and those of Baptists in the later seventeenth century. A closing chapter looks at confessions of faith with which individual churches supplemented their covenants. These were most numerous—twenty-seven in all—from 1660 onward, and they play a hitherto unappreciated role in the overall assessment of New England's religious development.	2
Weir, who teaches history at Nyack College, began his research at the American Antiquarian Society in 1984. He had then just completed a St. Andrews doctoral dissertation that won the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History and went to print six years later as The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought.¹ That volume predicted the present work, but readers should not therefore assume that Early New England is rebarbatively theological. Whether civil or ecclesiastical, all the covenants Weir canvasses had a religious dimension or orientation, but that element can be explicated without probing the complexities of the religious mind. Oddly, however, Weir omits any mention of John Winthrop's effort in his magnificent lay sermon, A Modell of Christian Charity (1630), to put a covenantal gloss on the main civil charter of the puritan diaspora.	3
The book's rewards, like its proportions, are encyclopedic. A checklist of towns, churches, and Indian praying places runs to twenty small-print pages; a typological list of local civil covenants covers six. There is a fifty-page summary of primary and secondary sources; extending beyond New England, it devotes nearly twenty pages to puritan ventures in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. Special acknowledgment is made of work accomplished by the Committee for a New England Bibliography, the Mormons' Family History Library Catalog, and Harold Worthley's inventory of Massachusetts church records. Eighty-three pages of endnotes offer up-to-date reading lists for topics as various as the colonial charters, the Baptists, millenarianism, and New England's Atlantic context.	4
Never before has the documentary base of New England's civil and religious polities been so generously measured and solidly laid. The inquiry's core comprises 122 local civil covenants (classified as "combination/compact," "charter," "legislative record," and "patent" [74]) and fifty-four surviving church covenants. Weir's central finding is that these sets "reflected a counterpoint of unity and diversity over the seventeenth century" (4). The civil covenants became standardized in content and form while the church covenants diversified. The later addition of confessions of faith served the latter process as congregations undertook to set their own doctrinal standards. "New England," Weir observes, "began to fracture religiously even as it was moving in the direction of a cohesive political uniformity" (11). The evidence amply offered sustains these generalizations.	. . .

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