In her context

Abstract

Anne Hutchinson is one of those iconic figures whose place in living memory is bought at the price of dislocation from her own space in time. Hutchinson's spirited witness against Puritan power and orthodoxy, displayed in her famous trials before the Massachusetts General Court and the Boston Church, has encouraged modern scholars to portray her as, among other things, a prophet of civil, religious, and women's liberty; the specifics of these interpretations matter less than the interpreters' shared sense that Hutchinson was a woman who stood apart from her culture. By contrast, Michael Winship wants to tell the story of “[t]he historical Anne Hutchinson [who] fit fairly comfortably into that seemingly alien and claustrophobic world” of Puritanism (4).