Introduction

Abstract

Diarmaid MacCulloch has written that religious institutions “create their own silences, by exclusions and by shared assumptions, which… silences are often at the expense of many of the people who could be thought of as actually constituting the Church.”¹ My goal in the pages that follow is to examine one such silence—the substantial omission of the role played by countless named and unnamed men and women in the story of the shaping of puritanism. The earliest histories of puritanism were written by clergymen and highlighted the importance of the clergy. William Hubbard, whose General History of New England was commissioned by the Massachusetts General Court in the 1670s, stated that “In the beginning of times was occasioned much disadvantage to the government of the church by making it too popular.”² Clerical authors such as Cotton Mather in New England and Samuel Clarke in England were themselves invested in the importance of the ministry and not unsurprisingly downplayed the role of the laity in the churches and focused on the role of prominent clergy in their accounts.