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Editor's Introduction: HJM is proud to select as our Editor's Choice Award for this issue Francis J. Bremer's superb biographical collection, First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in the Atlantic World (2012) published by the University of New Hampshire Press. Bremer, a leading authority on Puritanism and author of over a dozen books on the subject, takes a biographical approach to detail how Puritans' ideas and values ultimately contributed to the forming of our American government and institutions. In this collection he offers mini-biographies of eighteen Puritans, including well-known figure John Winthrop. These characters challenge and expand popular notions and stereotypes about Puritanism. As the book jacket explains:
With its cast of magistrates, women, clergy, merchants, and Native Americans, First Founders underscores the breadth ofearly American experience and the profound transatlantic roots of our country's forebears. Bremer succeeds in bringing little-known figures out of the shadows, while allowing us to appreciate better known figures in an entirely new light.
Both scholars and the general public will appreciate Bremer's engaging writing style and his ability to bring alive the complexity, richness, and diversity of the colonial world and the worldviews of its inhabitants. At the same time, he succeeds in conveying a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the broader philosophical, political, economic, and social foundations of puritan experiments in the Atlantic world.
In this issue, HJM offers an excerpt from Bremer's fifth chapter, titled "Four Strong Women," which explores the lives of Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) and Mary Dyer (c. 1611-1660). The outlines of Anne Hutchinson's life are known to many. Her name appears in both elementary and high school textbooks, while Mary Dyer's story is far less familiar. Yet, although Hutchinson was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her unorthodox religious views in 1643, Dyer was hanged in Boston in 1660for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony.
While Dyer's memory barely registers in the nation's popular historical consciousness, Hutchinson remains a contentious figure that has been lionized, mythologized, and demonized. After her death, Reverend John Winthrop referred to Hutchinson as "this American Jezebel," an epithet associated with the most evil woman in the Bible. In 1830 NathanialHawthorne wrote a "sketch"about her; some literary critics trace the character of Hester Prynne in...