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“Such Monstrous Births”: A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Anne Jacobson Schutte
Anne Jacobson Schutte*
Affiliation:
Lawrence University
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Extract

The Antinomian controversy of 1636-1638, the earliest major theological conflict in colonial New England, has attracted much scholarly attention. For many, the central figure in the drama, Anne Hutchinson, is a heroine, a champion of religious freedom against the bigoted theocratic Puritan establishment of Massachusetts Bay captained by the elder John Winthrop, Governor of the colony. Others have interpreted the Puritan prosecution of the Antinomians as perhaps regrettable but absolutely necessary; theological splintering might well have led, as most contemporaries believed it would, to a fatal political weakening of the young colony at a critical moment. One feature of the Antinomian episode, however, has not yet received the attention it deserves: the occurrence of two monstrous births, one in the midst of the controversy (although belatedly discovered) and the other at its denouement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , Spring 1985 , pp. 85 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1985

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References

1 Several popular biographies of Hutchinson portray her as a heroine: Augur, Helen, An American Jezebel: The Life of Anne Hutchinson (New York, 1930)Google Scholar; Curtis, Edith, Anne Hutchinson: A Biography (Cambridge, MA, 1930)Google Scholar; Rugg, Winnifred King, Unafraid: A Life of Anne Hutchinson (Boston, 1930)Google Scholar; Bolton, Reginald Pelham, A Woman Misunderstood: Anne, Wife of William Hutchinson (New York, 1931)Google Scholar; Crawford, Deborah, Four Women in a Violent Time (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. Emery Battis, in his scholarly but sympathetic treatment of Hutchinson, nevertheless argues against her being seen as a champion of religious freedom: Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill, 1962); and “Anne Hutchinson,” Notable American Women (3 vols.; Cambridge, MA, 1971), II, 245-247. Completely unsympathetic to Hutchinson is Winthrop's biographer, Morgan, Edmund S.: “The Case Against Anne Hutchinson,” New England Quarterly, 10 (1937), 635–649 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, 1958), pp. 134-54. For a persuasive interpretation of the controversy as a political conflict that served to delineate “the new boundaries of Puritanism in Massachusetts Bay,” see Erikson, Kai T., Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966), pp. 71–107 Google Scholar. Two scholars explore Hutchinson's activities from a feminist perspective: Barker-Benfield, Ben, “Anne Hutchinson and the Puritan Attitude Toward Women,” Feminist Studies, 1 (1972), 65–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Koehler, Lyle, “The Case of the American Jezebels: Anne Hutchinson and Female Agitation during the Years of Antinomian Turmoil, 1636-1640,” William and Mary Quarterly, 31 (1974), 55–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana, 1980), passim. The major primary sources for the Antinomian controversy are presented in The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History, ed. David D. Hall (Middletown, CT, 1968), cited hereafter as Hall.

2 Andrews Moriarty, G., “The True Story of Mary Dyer,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 104 (1950), 40–41 Google Scholar.

3 Dyer, William Allen, “William Dyer, a Rhode Island Dissenter,” Rhode Island Historical Society Collections, 30 (1937), 22–25 Google Scholar.

4 Adams, James Truslow, “Mary Dyer,” Dictionary of American Biography (20 vols.; New York, 1928-1936), V, 584 Google Scholar; Dyer, “William Dyer,” pp. 10-11.

5 Dyer, Louis, “William Dyer, a Somerset Royalist in New England,” Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset, 6 (1899), 271 Google Scholar.

6 Battis, Saints, pp. 90-91. According to Winthrop, Hutchinson chaired twiceweekly “public lectures,” attended by sixty to eighty people, at which she “resolv[ed] questions and expounded] Scripture“; she continued to hold these meetings even after the synod had banned them. Winthrop, John, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed. James Savage (2 vols.; Boston, 1853), I, 286, 294Google Scholar.

7 Hall, p. 199. Unless otherwise noted, what follows in this paragraph and the next is from Hall, pp. 4-10; and Stoever, William K. B., “A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven“: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, CT, 1978), pp. 23–31.Google Scholar

8 The first edition was entitled Antinomians and Familists Condemned by the Synod of Elders in New-England: with the Proceedings of the Magistrates against them, And their Apology for the same (London, 1644).

9 The news was disseminated more promptly in private correspondence. See Edmund Browne's letter to Sir Simonds D'Ewes (September 7, 1638), which contained a full description of Dyer's monster and a preliminary report on Hutchinson's, both obtained from Winthrop. Letters from New England: The Masschusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638, ed. Everett Emerson (Amherst, 1976), p. 230.

10 [John Winthrop], A Short Story of the Rise, reign, and mine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines, that infected the Churches of New-England, [ed. Thomas Weld] (London, 1644), p. 43; readily available in Hall, pp. 280-281 italics in the original). Subsequent references to A Short Story will be to Hall's edition.

11 Hall, pp. 281-282; Winthrop, History, I, 313-317. The quotations are from A Short Story; Cotton's role, however, is mentioned only in the journal. Cotton's second reason for advising concealment—that he would not have wanted publicity if the mon diagster had been his child—may well stem from the fact that in October 1637 his wife was pregnant for the third time. Ziff, Larzer, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (Princeton, 1962), p. 168 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Massachusetts Bay authorities lacked one resource available to the magistrates of Nuremberg a few years earlier. When a monster (probably Siamese twins) was born in the outlying village of Liretzhofen in 1592, the city fathers dispatched an artist to sketch it, after which it was quietly buried. Staatsarchiv Nurnberg, Rep. 60b, vol. 50, fol. 379v (January 4, 1592). I owe this information and the reference to Merry E. Wiesner.

12 Hall, p. 214. Dr. Clarke's report is in Winthrop, History, I, 326-328; also in Battis, Saints, pp. 347-48.

13 Margaret V. Richardson and Arthur T. Hertig, “New England's First Recorded Hydatidiform Mole,” New England Journal of Medicine, 207 (1959), 544-45. See also Potter, Edith L., “Defective Babies Who Die at Birth,” in Birth Defects, ed. Morris Fishbein (Philadelphia, 1963), pp. 52–53 Google Scholar.

14 Anencephalia is “a malformation characterized by complete or partial absence of the brain and overlying skull,” in which “the absence of the cranial vault renders the face very prominent and somewhat extended; the eyes often protrude markedly from their sockets.” About 70% of anencephalics are female. They are often carried to full term, or even beyond. If not stillborn, they die soon after birth. Since the head is abnormally small, breech presentations are common. Williams Obstetrics, 15th ed., ed. Jack A. Pritchard and Paul C. MacDonald (New York, 1976), pp. 829-31. Jane Hawkins told Winthrop and his colleagues that Dyer's baby “came hiplings till she turned it.” Winthrop, History, I, 314. There is only a 4.5% chance of a woman's bearing more than one anencephalic; Dyer had one previous and six subsequent normal children. Gilbert W. Mellin, “The Frequency of Birth Defects,” in Birth Defects, ed. Fishbein, pp. 12-15; Dyer, “William Dyer,” pp. 40-41. The occurrence ofanencephalia in the United States is .177% among whites and .024% among blacks, but it is more common in certain parts of the British Isles, notably South Wales, where the incidence in the period 1958-1962 was .345%. Mellin, pp. 12-15; C. O. Carter, K. M. Lawrence, and P. A. David, “The Genetics of the Major Central Nervous System Malformations, Based on the South Wales Sociogenetic Investigation,” Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, Supplement 13 (1967), 30-34. The modern description of anencephalia accords perfectly with Winthrop's account of the gross malformations of the head, bony protuberances from which could easily have been seen as horns. The details he provided about the back point to a severe form of spina bifida, which often occurs in conjunction with anencephalia. Williams Obstetrics, p. 831. The three-clawed feet suggest Type V syndactyly, in which two or more toes are fused. Samia A. Temtamy, “Syndactyly,” in Birth Defects: Atlas and Compendium, ed. Daniel Bergsma (Baltimore, 1973). P. 835 (#772). The only feature of Winthrop's description that does not correspond to any abnormality known to modern medicine is the reversal of the torso. Here, perhaps, Winthrop was misled by Hawkins about a detail that would have been extremely difficult either to verify or to dismiss through examination of a partially decomposed corpse.

15 Pliny, Historia naturalis, VII.2; Augustine, De civitate Dei, XVI. 8.

16 For example, the thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Livre de merveilles, discussed by Höllander, Eugen, Wunder, Wundergeburt und Wundergestalt in Einblattdrucken des funfzehnten bis achtzehntenjahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1921), p. 301 Google Scholar.

17 See, for example, the first German natural history, Conrad von Megenberg's Buch der Natur, written around 1350 and issued several times by various Augsburg printers between 1475 and 1499. Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, Réveils et prodiges: Le gothique fantastique (Paris, 1960), p. 260 Google Scholar.

18 Céard, Jean, La nature et lesprodiges: L'insolite au XVIe siècle (Geneva, 1977), pp 71–78 Google Scholar; Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England and France,” Past and Present, No. 92 (Aug. 1981), 30-34.

19 Céard, pp. 60-71.

20 Rudolf, Schenda, “Das Monstrum von Ravenna: Eine Studie zur Prodigiensliteratur,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 66 (1960), 209–215 Google Scholar.

21 Fenton, John, Certaine Secrete wonders of Nature, containing a description of sundry strange things, seeming monstrous in our eyes and iudgement, because we are not privie to the reasons of them (London, 1569), pp. 140–140 v Google Scholar. The original is in Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses, first issued in 1560 (Paris, 1564), pp. 180-182. On Fenton, a soldier of fortune, see Dictionary of National Biography, VI, 1184-86; on Boaistuau, see Ceard, Nature, pp. 252-64. The monster of Ravenna also appears in the compilation by Conrad Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum acostentorum chronicon (Basel, 1557), p. 516; English translation of this work by Bateman, Stephen, The Doome warning all men to the Iudgement: Wherein are contaynedfor the most parte all the straunge Prodigies hapned in the Worlde, with divers secrete figures of Revelations tending to mannes stayed conversion towards God (London, 1581), pp. 294–295 Google Scholar.

22 Céard, Nature, pp. 242-253.

23 Fenton, Certaine Secrete wonders, sig. A3V.

24 Bateman, Doome, p. 380. On Bateman, holder of a Cambridge divinity degree who served as domestic chaplain and librarian to Archbishop Matthew Parker, see Dictionary of National Biography, I, 1334; on Lycosthenes, see Ceard, Nature, pp. 190-191.

25 Céard, , Nature, pp. 293–305 Google Scholar.

26 Paré, Ambroise, Des monstres ctprodiges (t)73), ed. Jean Céard (Geneva, 1971), p. 7 Google Scholar.

27 Paré, pp. 32-33. I have incorporated into the quotation Céard's modernization of the place name; the town is in the département of Lot-et-Garonne in southwestern France.

28 Céard, , Nature, pp. 432–472 Google Scholar; for a different approach, see Park and Daston, “Unnatural Conceptions,” pp. 34-43.

29 Lange, Konrad, Der Papstesel: Ein Beitrag zur Kultur- und Kunstgeschichte der Reformationszeitalters (Göttingen, 1891); Baltrušaitis, pp. 312–313, 323Google Scholar.

30 Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939; rpt. Cambridge, MA, 1963), pp. 207–231 Google Scholar; Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), pp. 79–112 Google Scholar. On a seventeenth-century Anglican interpreter of special providences, see Schutte, Anne Jacobson, “An Early Stuart Critique of Machiavelli as Historiographer: Thomas Jackson and the Discorsi ,” Albion, 15 (1983), 1–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 See especially Ames, William, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, first issued in 1623 (London, [1638?]), pp. 30–45 Google Scholar; and Preston, John, Life Etemall, or a Treatise of the Divine Essence and Attributes (London, 1631), pp. 150–155 Google Scholar.

32 Miller, , New England Mind, pp. 227–228 Google Scholar.

33 Thomas, , Religion, pp. 91, 110-111.Google Scholar

34 Winthrop spent about two years (1602-1604) at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was at Gray's Inn for an undetermined period. Morgan, Winthrop, pp. 5-6, 15.

35 Ziff, , Career of John Cotton, pp. 167–168 Google Scholar; Miller, , New England Mind, p. 229 Google Scholar.

36 The special providences in Winthrop's journal, which deserve a more extended treatment than is possible here, fall into several categories: instances of God's special concern for the colony as a whole; escapes from environmentally perilous situations by individuals and small groups whose standing with God is not indicated; both avoidance of environmental peril as a reward for especially deserving individuals and destruction by such perils as condign punishment for wicked individuals; strange happenings which virtually demand interpretation (a mouse's victory in combat with a snake [History, I, 97-98], Winthrop's dream about his wife and children [I, 141], mice gnawing through the younger John Winthrop's Book of Common Prayer but ignoring the Greek New Testament and Psalms bound together with it [II, 24], a snake's appearance in a synod meeting [II, 403]); peculiar atmospheric phenomena; and monsters with prodigious significance (the deformed pig of New Haven, whose putative father was a “loose fellow” of the town [II, 73] and a monstrous calf at Ipswich [II, 311]).

37 Hall, p. 341.

38 Weld took his B.A. at Trinity, College, Cambridge, in 1613/14 and his M.A. in 1618. Stearns, Raymond P., “Thomas Weld,” Dictionary of American Biography, XIX, 627 Google Scholar. On his activities during and after the Antinomian controversy, see also Hall, pp. 200, 340. Stearns (p. 627) asserts that Weld, embroiled in English politics, “was induced by Presbyterian plotters” to issue A Short Story, which made the Massachusetts Bay authorities appear intolerant and thus embarrassed the English Independents and Weld himself. Ziff speculates, more plausibly, that Weld supervised the publication “perhaps under the mistaken belief that in publishing Winthrop's highly partial account of the affair at the time he was offering proof of the ability of the Congregational system to check error.” John Cotton on the Churches of New England, ed. Larzer Ziff (Cambridge, MA, 1968), pp. 23-24. Stoever (pp. 11-12) concurs with Ziff.

39 Hall, pp. 214-15.

40 Augur (AmericanJezebel, pp. 245-246), Bolton (Woman Misunderstood, pp. 92-93), and Koehler (“Case,” p. 73) wrongly claim that accusations against Dyer and Hutchinson of witchcraft and/or adultery with Henry Vane, one-time governor and adherent of Hutchinson, were publicly raised in 1637-1638. As we shall see, the possibility of witchcraft in these cases was first suggested by Edward Johnson more than a decade later. The only allusion to Vane's supposed liaisons with Hutchinson and Dyer comes from an English memorandum written about thirty years later by Sir Joseph Williamson, Secretary of State under Charles II; he claimed that his information came from a Major Scott. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Ist ser., 13 (1873-1875), 132.

41 Stoever, “A Faire andEasie Way …“passim.

42 Stoever, p. 46.

43 Stoever, p. 30 and passim.

44 Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied (originally issued in 1659), in The Works of Thomas Shepard, ed. John A. Albro (3 vols.; 1853; rpt. New York, 1967), II, 1-634.

45 One of the few exceptions was “the Pequot hornet.” Shepard, II, 378.

46 This sermon cycle was published by his son and namesake (minister in Charlestown) and Jonathan Mitchell (his successor in Cambridge), who obviously had an opportunity to edit out such pointed references. They claimed, however, not to have done so. Shepard, II, 9. Shepard's autobiography and journal contain no reference to the monsters. God's Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety, Being the Autobiography & Journal of Thomas Shepard, ed. Michael McGiffert (Amherst, 1972).

47 Cotton was educated at Trinity and Emmanuel Colleges, Cambridge; he proceeded B.A. in 1602/3 and M.A. in 1606. Ziff, Career of John Cotton, pp. 6-15.

48 Stoever, “A Faire and Easie Way . . .,” pp. 34-57.

49 Ziff (Career, pp. 166-67) shows that Cotton was “consistently reluctant” to engage in the interpretation of petty special providences in the natural world.

50 Ziff, p. 168.

51 Winthrop, History, I, 326-28.

52 Cotton, , Way, injohn Cotton on the Churches, pp. 238-40Google Scholar; also in Hall, pp. 411—13.

53 Wheelwright studied at Sidney College, Cambridge, taking his B.A. in 1614/15 and his M.A. in 1618. James Truslow-Adams, “John Wheelwright,” Dictionary of American Biography, XX, 62.

54 The full title is Mercurius Americanus, Mr. Welds his Antitype, or Massachusetts great Apologie examined, Being Observations upon a Paper styled, A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Familists, Libertines &c. which infected the Churches of NEW-ENGLAND, &c. Wherein some parties therein concerned are vindicated, and the truth generally cleared (London, 1645). Subsequent references to this work are in parentheses in the text (italics in the original). Background information is from John Wheelwright: His Writings, ed. Charles H. Bell, Publications of the Prince Society, No. 9 (1876; rpt. New York, n.d.), pp. 29-53. Wheelwright later stated (pp. 58-60) that he had also responded to the Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford's assertion that the two misbirths helped to lead the misguided colonists “a little nearer to Presbyterial Government.” Rutherford, A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist (London, 1648), pp. 177, 181-82 (italics in the original). Wheelwright's rejoinder has not survived.

55 Naturally enough, since the title page of A Short Story did not bear Winthrop's name, and Weld's introduction did not make it clear that Winthrop was the author. Many writers on the Antinomian controversy have attributed the work to Weld, but as Hall (pp. 199-200) has conclusively shown, Winthrop was solely responsible for all but the preface.

56 Franklin Jameson, J., Introduction to Edward Johnson, Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, 1628-1651 (New York, 1910), pp. 3–10 Google Scholar.

57 For example, Baillie, Robert, Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time (London, 1645), p. 61 Google Scholar; and Rutherford, pp. 181-82. Rutherford's treatise was directed primarily against English Familist preachers, some of whom may have influenced Hutchinson and Cotton. On this broader context of Antinomianism, see Stoever, “A Faire and Easie Way … ” pp. 167-168, 234n; and Maclear, J. F., “Anne Hutchinson and the Mortalist Heresy,” New England Quarterly, 54 (1981), 74–103 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Johnson, Providence, pp. 132-133. He used witchcraft terminology elsewhere (p. 173) in describing the downfall of the Antinomians: “They [their errors] have never stood up in a living manner among us since, but sometimes like Wizards to peepe and mutter out of ground, fit for such people to resort unto, as will goe from the living to the dead.” Johnson undoubtedly knew that Hawkins had been banished from the colony in 1641, at least in part on suspicion of witchcraft in connection with her practice of midwifery. Winthrop, History, I, 316n, 317; Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1628-1686, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (5 vols, in 6; Boston, 1853-54), I. 224, 329. On the widespread belief that midwives had dangerous connections with the powers of evil, see Forbes, Thomas Rogers, The Midwife and the Witch (New Haven, 1966)Google Scholar; and Barker-Benfield, pp. 82-83.

59 Johnson, Providence, p. 187; on p. 153 he calls the Antinomians’ activities “a Machiavilian Plot.“

60 Thomas, Religion, pp. 94-95; Park and Daston, “Unnatural Conceptions,” pp. 43-51.

61 Miller, New England Mind, pp. 228-31. Increase Mather's An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (Boston, 1684) includes several examples from the early history of Massachusetts Bay, but not the Pyer and Hutchinson monsters.

62 Koehler (“Case,” Search for Power) comes close to making this assertion, but the deliberately exaggerated Gramscian vocabulary here is mine.