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John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father. By Francis J. Bremer. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xviii, 478. $39.95.)
This ambitious and extensively researched biography of John Winthrop (1588-1649) is appropriately scaled to do justice to the first governor of Massachusetts and the principal figure in seventeenth-century New England. Despite the obviously central importance of this leader, he has received surprisingly little attention since Edmund Morgan published his brief and provocative biography, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, back in 1958. I contributed a fifty-page sketch of him in my three-generation study of the Winthrop family, Puritans and Yankees (1962), and more recently, Laetitia Yeandle and I produced a new edition of The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649 (1996). Lee Schweninger and James G. Moseley published commentaries on Winthrop in 1990 and 1992, respectively. But none of us has assessed the governor's career in full nor reinterpreted Winthrop's role in light of the enormous recent literature on New England Puritanism. Frank Bremer is perfectly positioned for this task. The author of a series of books on the fruitful interaction between Puritans in England and New England, most notably Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610-1692 (1994), Bremer is also the editor of the Winthrop Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society and has produced a volume of Winthrop's religious manuscripts forthat series. Bremer's biography is the best and most thorough study of the man that we have to date.
There are three distinctive features to Bremer's book. First, unlike all of his predecessors, Bremer digs deeply into Winthrop's family heritage and his life in England, from his admission to Trinity College, Cambridge, at age fourteen to his emigration to America at age forty-two. In fact, Bremer spends nearly half of his narrative on the English background to...