Making Heretics is a major new narrative of the famous Massachusetts disputes of the late 1630s misleadingly labeled the "antinomian controversy" by later historians. Drawing on an unprecedented range of sources, Michael Winship fundamentally recasts these interlocked religious and political struggles as a complex ongoing interaction of personalities and personal agendas and as a succession of short-term events with cumulative results. Previously neglected figures like Sir Henry Vane and John Wheelwright assume leading roles in the processes that nearly ended Massachusetts, while more familiar "hot Protestants" like John Cotton and Anne Hutchinson are relocated in larger frameworks. The book features a striking portrayal of the minister Thomas Shepard as an angry heresy-hunting militant, helping to set the volatile terms on which the disputes were conducted and keeping the flames of contention stoked even as he ostensibly attempted to quell them. The first book-length treatment in forty years, Making Heretics locates its story in rich contexts, ranging from ministerial quarrels and negotiations over fine but bitterly contested theological points to the shadowy worlds of orthodox and unorthodox lay piety, and from the transatlantic struggles over the Massachusetts Bay Company's charter to the fraught apocalyptic geopolitics of the Reformation itself. An object study in the ways that puritanism generated, managed, and failed to manage diversity, Making Heretics carries its account on into England in the 1640s and 1650s and helps explain the differing fortunes of puritanism in the Old and New Worlds.
Author
A specialist in the history of religion in colonial America, Michael Winship is professor of history at the University of Georgia, where he holds the E. Merton Coulter Chair. Michael Winship's most recent book is Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and Massachusetts' City on a Hill (Harvard UP, 2012), a Choice Academic Title of the Year for 2012. Previous books include Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (Princeton UP, 2002), The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided (UP of Kansas, 2005) and, with Edward J. Larson, The Constitutional Convention: A Narrative History from the Notes of James Madison (Random House, 2005.) Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America is forthcoming with Yale University Press. Recent articles include ''Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c.1570-1606,'' English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1050-1074; ''Algernon Sidney's Calvinist Republicanism,'' Journal of British Studies 49 (2010), 753-773; ''Defining Puritanism in Restoration England: Richard Baxter and Others Respond to A Friendly Debate,'' Historical Journal 54 (2011), 689-715; "Straining the Bonds of Puritanism: English Presbyterians and Massachusetts Congregationalists Debate Ecclesiology, 1636–40," in Crawford Gribben, Scott Spurlock, eds. Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600-1800 (Palgrave, 2015), pp. 89-111. A chapter on New England religion from the 1680s-1730s, "Congregationalist Hegemony in New England, from the 1680s to the 1730s," is in the Cambridge History of Religions in America, vol I (New York, 2012), and a chapter on the various early forms of English church establishments in the Americas, '' British America to 1662." is in the Oxford History of Anglicanism, vol. I (Oxford, 2017).
