Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–1649: Heroic Souls [1st ed.] 9783030508449, 9783030508456

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CHRISTIANITIES IN THE TRANS-ATLANTIC WORLD

Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–1649 Heroic Souls

Lori Rogers-Stokes

Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World

Series Editors Crawford Gribben Department of History Queen’s University Belfast Belfast, UK Scott Spurlock Department of Theology and Religious Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK

Building upon the recent recovery of interest in religion in the early modern trans-Atlantic world, this series offers fresh, lively and inter-­ disciplinary perspectives on the broad view of its subject. Books in the series will work strategically and systematically to address major but under-studied or overly simplified themes in the religious and cultural history of the trans-­Atlantic. The series editorial board includes David Bebbington (University of Stirling), John Coffey (University of Leicester), Susan Hardman Moore (University of Edinburgh), Andrew Holmes (Queen’s University Belfast), John Morrill (University of Cambridge), Richard Muller (Calvin Theological Seminary), Mark Noll (University of Notre Dame), Dana L.  Robert (Boston University) and Arthur Williamson (California State University, Sacramento). More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14892

Lori Rogers-Stokes

Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–1649 Heroic Souls

Lori Rogers-Stokes Arlington, MA, USA

Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World ISBN 978-3-030-50844-9    ISBN 978-3-030-50845-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50845-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Basotxerri / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

An independent scholar is never independent. I began my research in Arlington, Massachusetts, where Doreen Stevens, then director of the town’s historic house and museum, welcomed me, then redirected me to the Andover-Harvard Theological Library. There I received expert assistance from Fran O’Donnell, then curator of manuscripts and archives. It was from Ms. O’Donnell that I learned the ropes of working with fragile artifacts; whenever I visit another library I compare their procedures, watchfulness, and level of care with hers. Rose Doherty, then president of the Partnership of the Historic Bostons, took an active interest in my work and suggested me as a speaker to a wide range of organizations. I am grateful to those generous and engaged audiences at the Boston Public Library; Lynnfield Historical Society; New England Historic Genealogical Society; Newport Historical Society in Rhode Island; Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UMass Boston; House of Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts; Deane Winthrop House; Massachusetts Historical Society; Historic Newton; and Arlington Historical Society. Peggy Bendroth, then executive director of the Congregational Library and Archives in Boston, also engaged me for a talk; it was there that I became aware of New England’s Hidden Histories (NEHH), the digitization project sponsored by the Library, which is making tens of thousands of pages of previously lost records from colonial Congregational churches in New England available online. I began working with Helen Gelinas, editor-in-chief of NEHH, in 2013, as one of many volunteers. Helen became a friend as she led me into and through the sink-or-swim v

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immersion process that is transcribing seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century manuscripts, and widened the frame of my scholarship. I published my first journal article in the New England Quarterly. As an unpublished public historian, seeking to publish a first article, based on a contrarian reading of an already well-studied set of records, in a major academic journal, I might have had many strikes against me. Instead, Leonard von Morzé and Jonathan Chu gave me fair consideration, and a moment of great pride when my article appeared in that venerable journal. I found the Deacon’s Books, whose first nine leaves contain the only existing Shepard-era records we have from First Church Cambridge, aside from the records of trial studied here, at the Houghton Library at Harvard. My thanks go to John Overholt, curator of the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Early Books and Manuscripts, and Susan Pyzynski, associate librarian of Houghton Library for Technical Services, who made themselves available to me time and again as I expanded my work transcribing these nine leaves. Ashley Cataldo, now curator of manuscripts at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, was an invaluable resource as I transcribed the Shepard leaves of the Deacon’s Books. She embodies the AAS’ commitment to public scholarship. The special manuscript collections room of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) is where the earlier Shepard manuscripts transcribed by Selement and Woolley are kept. My regular visits to look at the same small notebook over and over must have aroused some curiosity. I am grateful to all the staff at NEHGS for their help, but particularly Timothy Salls, then manager of Manuscript Collections, American Ancestors & New England Historic Genealogical Society. David Powers, Lee Wright, and Sarah Stewart are all fellow independent scholars who encouraged me, took an interest in my work, pointed me to resources, and offered advice. David in particular inspires me with the depth of his scholarship and his robust good cheer. My first talk on the heroic souls of the Cambridge women was at History Camp Boston, the un-conference Lee founded, where I got thoughtful questions that helped shape my thinking. I deeply appreciate Sarah’s evergreen interest in and deep enthusiasm for the world of the seventeenth-century puritans. Dorothy Feldman, Rebecca Wolfe, Connie Mooney, Maria Flanagan, Mae Klinger, and Patricia Garcia-Rios are all non-historians who asked me good questions and showed real interest in the women who lived in Cambridge nearly 400 years ago. Their interest confirmed my belief that

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this book has something of value to offer to a general audience, and that all scholarship should speak to the wider world. Francis Bremer commented on an early chapter of this book, providing invaluable feedback. We last met at History Camp Boston, which befits his tireless and genuine commitment to making history accessible to the general public. When I think about where my scholarly interest in the puritans began, I quickly locate it in reading James F. Cooper’s book Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Massachusetts. Years afterward, I met Jeff, now director of NEHH, at a Congregational Library event, and he welcomed the acquaintance in the most generous way. Much of my scholarship since then has been touched in some way by Jeff; most crucially, he read two rounds of drafts of this book. His ability to confirm my deeply contrarian reading while holding me to my obligation to honor the secondary literature has been priceless. I’m deeply grateful to Jeff for his continued friendship and mentorship. All of my family have followed my scholarly progress with interest, but I especially thank my parents, Jim and Irene; my brother Jim; my husband Peter; my son Paul; and my daughter Juliette. Since I was ten years old, my father has asked me when I was going to write a book; I’m very happy to tell him that the day has finally come.

Contents

1 Re-reading, Re-interpreting, and Recovering Priceless Texts  1 2 Close-Reading the Shepard Manuscripts 39 3 “Venture and Try”: Women Taking the Ultimate Leap of Faith 81 4 The Shepard Context103 5 Heroic Souls: Reading the Cambridge Women’s Records131 6 Conclusion175 Index187

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.8 Fig. 2.9 Fig. 2.10 Fig. 2.11

Mrs. Crackbone’s narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”) 49 Close-up of the Crackbone narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)50 Conclusion of the Crackbone narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)51 Start of John Stansby’s narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)52 Christopher Cane’s narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”) 53 Ruth Ames’ struck-through narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)54 Q&A in Goodman Daniell’s narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)55 Close-up of Q&A. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors— New England Historic Genealogical Society”) 56 Close-up of Jane Stevenson’s narrative. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”) 61 Q&A in Jane Stevenson’s narrative. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”) 61 Heading for Isabell Jackson’s narrative by unknown writer. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”) 64 xi

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Fig. 2.12 Fig. 2.13 Fig. 2.14 Fig. 2.15 Fig. 2.16

Shepard’s heading for Jackson’s narrative. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”) Continuation of Jackson’s narrative recorded in a third hand. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”) Editorial arrow at the end of the page. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”) Close-up of Jackson’s narrative. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”) Close-up of Daniel Gookin’s narrative. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”)

64 64 68 70 72

CHAPTER 1

Re-reading, Re-interpreting, and Recovering Priceless Texts

A sample exploration of the records suggests that a thorough study would answer some old questions and provoke new ones. (Edmund S. Morgan, “New England Puritanism: Another Approach,” The William and Mary Quarterly 18, No. 2 [April 1961]: 238) —Edmund S. Morgan

Fifty-seven years ago, the renowned puritan scholar Edmund Morgan published a short piece in the “Notes and Documents” section of The William and Mary Quarterly, in which he suggested that a “thorough examination of the records of a large number of towns—records of births, marriages, and deaths, of baptisms, admissions to communion, and church discipline” would allow historians to “test our current assumptions” about puritan religion and society in New England.1 One respected scholar, Darrett B. Rutman, responded a little over a year later in the pages of the same journal by tearing Morgan’s hypothesis to shreds.2 Unpersuaded as he was by Morgan’s suggestion that scholars revisit their certainties about puritan next-generation declension, Rutman did agree with Morgan’s call for a re-examination of the primary records. “There should be no argument with Morgan’s method,” he stated on his first page. “Advocates of one school of thought or another regarding New England Puritanism and the section as a whole have long drawn generalities from generalities; Morgan would have generalities built upon specifics.”3 © The Author(s) 2020 L. Rogers-Stokes, Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–1649, Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50845-6_1

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I am in good company, then, in writing this book. It is dedicated to re-­examining records which are very familiar to scholars of puritan New England, to provoking new questions, and, unavoidably, to arguing forcefully against long-established hypotheses about those records. My respect for the scholars I argue with is real, but my opposition to their hypotheses is often fundamental. My arguments are drawn from the specifics provided by the transcriptions of two sets of manuscript records, one published in 1981 by George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley and another published in 1991 by Mary Rhinelander McCarl. Each was described as a transcription of puritan minister Thomas Shepard’s on-the-spot recording of oral relations of faith delivered by candidates for full church membership in the town of Cambridge, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Selement and Woolley presented fifty-one narratives dated roughly 1638–1645 as The Confessions of Thomas Shepard. McCarl published sixteen later Shepard-era narratives as “Thomas Shepard’s Record of Relations of Religious Experience, 1648-1649” and presented them as the copies Shepard made of his own on-the-spot dictation at some point afterward. Scholars ever since have accepted them as such. My study of both sets of records has led me to a bold conclusion: they are not in fact relations of faith, and they were not written down in the moment as people made their bid for church membership. They are instead records of trial sessions—the multiple private or semi-private meetings between a New England puritan seeker and their minister, elders, and/or selected laypeople, during which relations were developed over time as seekers shared their progress and their problems. This fundamentally changes our approach to and understanding of the Shepard manuscripts. As records of relations, they present a congregation of lost and miserable souls struggling and failing to express assurance of grace—yet somehow granted church membership. As records of trial, they reveal an amazing snapshot of puritan spiritual seeking, a “you are there” glimpse into a specific moment in time: an intimate meeting between seeker and minister where the ongoing work of discovering grace is reviewed, picked up, and carried forward.4 The misrepresentation of the manuscripts as relations of faith set in motion a domino effect: scholars read them as such, were baffled by the fact that so few of them expressed assurance of grace, and developed theories to explain this that demonized Shepard, his congregants, the Congregational church in New England, and the puritan society within

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which the church stood. I will refer to many of these theories in this book. Before I do that, however, I will give a brief overview of why the rediscovery, transcription, and publication of these records were so exciting to scholars, what led me to the understanding that they are records of trial, and why reading them as relations warps our understanding of Shepard, his congregation, and the only existing records they left us. To understand why these finds were so exciting, one has to understand a little of the process through which early puritan, or Congregational, church-goers became full church members. In early puritan New England, all inhabitants of a town were expected to attend church, but only those who were able to narrate a persuasive personal history of their successful spiritual seeking were granted the full church membership that allowed them to baptize their infant children and to take communion. (These were the only two sacraments the puritans observed.) These spiritual autobiographies, called conversion narratives or relations of faith, were delivered in front of an audience of other church members and the minister. We know this from descriptions of this requirement given by contemporary Congregational ministers and New England observers.5 But for a few centuries, actual records of these relations were scanty. There were a wealth of publications arguing about this unique requirement for church membership in New England, but very few examples of the relations themselves.6 Thus when Selement and Woolley published what they described as a set of fifty-one relations from early Cambridge, and McCarl followed with sixteen more ten years later, the impact on scholarship was substantial. The notebook of Thomas Shepard, where the Selement and Woolley records are found, had technically been available to scholars at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, Massachusetts, for about a century by 1981, but Shepard’s handwriting was difficult, and small, and it seems that either few people managed to decipher it, or few people made the attempt. The refusal of NEHGS’ turn-of-the-twentieth-century leadership to allow the transcription and publication of this notebook reserved it to those few scholars who traveled to Boston and attempted to read it.7 The records McCarl found had been similarly lost to scholars when they were misfiled in a past century into the Mather Family papers at the American Antiquarian Society and described partly as “visits to prisoners.” When at last the modern NEHGS allowed Selement and Woolley to transcribe and publish the records, and McCarl found the AAS notebook, realized what it was, and transcribed and published it, both collections were eagerly devoured by scholars of puritan New England.

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In part, that eagerness was rewarded. Here was a priceless opportunity to read the stories average people told about their lives—a window into the lived experience of common English puritans in the seventeenth century. Here were mostly average people telling personal, even intimate, stories of their personal search for God’s will. Farmers, students, housewives, and servants described their efforts to discover whether God had granted them salvation through predestination.8 They talked about the sermons they heard, the conversations they had, their highest moments of triumph, and their lowest moments of despair. They recorded the impact of epidemic sickness, personal bereavement, and political upheaval on their individual lives. They explained the thought processes that led them through what the puritans called spiritual preparation—preparation to receive God’s message of salvation or damnation. Reading the descriptions that average women and men gave of this journey toward God’s will was revelatory. Principles expounded in sermons were seen for the first time through the immediate lens of common listeners’ real-world application. Learning how the people understood and used the tools of spiritual seeking was powerful for scholars of puritan New England, who had been brought up in the historical school of Perry Miller and Samuel Eliot Morison, which taught roughly that puritan ministers exerted dictatorial control over their congregations, telling them what to think and what to do at every turn.9 Instead, the Cambridge records showed people thinking deeply on their own about the path of spiritual preparation that they followed as puritans, people actively engaged with sermons and other means of godly instruction, and relating them to their own life circumstances.10 But this upside was paired with a powerful downside: the records were very difficult to understand. The language was compressed, sometimes to the point of being impenetrable. Sentences were missing key words. The text ran in long blocks down the printed pages of both Selement and Woolley and McCarl, unrelieved by paragraph breaks or organization of thought. Many sentences were fragmentary, and some seemed nonsensical. Attempting to parse what exactly people had meant became a full-time job of dismayed historians approaching the Cambridge records. Scholars concluded that the compressed language of the records was the result of Shepard taking dictation, as it were, as a candidate made their formal relation to the church.11 As Michael McGiffert put it,

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Picture the scene at Cambridge at the moment we cut in. The church members [pack] the benches of the small, plain meetinghouse. The minister sits at one side, quill pen poised. The candidate for admission stands, takes a breath, gets ready—no speaking had even been so hard.12

This scene makes sense as an explanation of Shepard’s compressed language. Why else would he fail to write out the important Bible verses that the candidates recite or reference, or even give the book and verse? Why would he skip so many words, creating jazz-like sentences where one must hear the words that were not spoken as much as those that were? He must have been in a hurry to keep up as each candidate’s narrative spilled out. Yet McCarl explicitly argued that both sets of records served an official purpose. “Shepard made his original notes on separate pieces of paper, which he later copied into his notebook. [This] was a formal record kept for a formal parochial purpose on the model of the notebook kept by John Fiske of Wenham and Chelmsford.”13 The question McCarl’s theory begs is this: if Shepard were carefully recording a “formal record” of a relation for a “formal parochial purpose,” why didn’t he do a better job? He had been present at the live relation, so when he set out to write a formal record of it at some later point, he could have filled in the gaps of his hurried transcription with what he remembered. Then the record would have made sense as a formal, parochial resource—something later pastors, or elders, could easily read and understand. He could have properly cited those all-important biblical references. As it is, the records we have are not clear and easily usable as formal records. Scholars developed one theory to explain why a supposedly formal record from an early puritan church in New England would be so difficult to make sense of, which was that even a full record of the candidates’ speech would have revealed much the same thing as the compressed record: a miserable people unable to understand or accurately identify or express their deepest emotions, a people controlled by their powerful minister, and in particular, miserably oppressed and inarticulate women.14 These were a hopeless people striving for a salvation that did not and could not exist, and deep down, they knew it. It was, ironically, this theory in the secondary material that began to change my mind about the primary material. When I first approached these records, I too found them disappointing, as I struggled to make sense of the language in so many of them. Yet something kept pulling me back to these voices.15 A passage I could not understand in the Cambridge

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records, when explained by another scholar as a proof of the misery of puritanism, and particularly its sexism, seemed to me to stubbornly resist that reading.16 In this context, I began to read the women’s records almost exclusively. Most of the records in both collections are women’s, and as I read them, new features began to leap out at me. As I will document at length below, they are astoundingly anachronous. Most are completely unbounded by sex or gender—without Shepard’s labeling (“Mistress Gookin” or “Goodman Fessingdon”), a reader could not tell whether the speaker was a man or a woman. To find seventeenth-century women’s narratives that are missing the basic markers of sex is amazing.17 They are also unbounded by traditional roles of parent, spouse, child, relative, or even parishioner. In these narratives, there is only the individual woman and her God, and her search for that God’s will, informed by others along the way who offer help or harm, but in the end completely reliant on that individual woman’s ability to read, listen, and talk, to interpret and decipher scripture, to make use of sermons, and to enter into counsel with others, sometimes in the form of the minister or elder, but often in the form of her female friends and relatives. This strong individuality in the primary records contradicted the secondary literature’s descriptions of women crippled by sexism and self-doubt. The voices of the women reasserted themselves over the joined voices of their later readers. As I re-read the records, I began to recognize the language in many of them that signaled assurance, and my perception of the stories they told was slowly transformed. Fortified by new insights, I published an article on the Cambridge records in which I confidently stated that all of them manifested assurance of grace.18 It was not until I was finishing a new article on the women’s relations that my perception was fundamentally altered by a visit to NEHGS to photograph a few pages of the original manuscripts for illustrations. What I found forever changed my perspective and my work, and transformed that article into this book. In short, despite years of studying these records, I found that when I looked at the original manuscripts, I was in the same position as Georgiana Darcy at the end of Pride and Prejudice: my mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in my way. For those original manuscripts were so different from the published versions as to tell a completely new story than the one that I—and other scholars—knew. First, the lines of Shepard’s writing throughout the notebooks are perfectly even; blots and smears are almost nonexistent;

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cross-­outs and added words are few; there is little uneven ink flow showing that a quill was running dry with no time to dip it. Shepard’s writing is small, and he makes time-consuming long tails on the letters. In a few of the records, his writing is very tiny but perfectly formed. This could not be done in the rush of writing as a person made a live speech without stopping. Mary Rhinelander McCarl is the only scholar who acknowledges this, albeit about the later book of 1648–1649 records only, noting “the neatness of the writing, which is cramped but not untidy, the interpolated words and letters, and the minuteness of the script.”19 More importantly, the manuscript pages were replete with crucial punctuation and paragraphing that showed long pauses or even full stops in the narrative, new trains of thought, and perhaps even recorded bits of conversation. Shepard worked hard to make these breaks and pauses very clear, to emphasize places in their stories where people stopped to take stock, regroup, consider a new idea, or break down. Yet in the transcriptions, the records are presented in long blocks of text unbroken by paragraphs, and the voices of the speakers seemed to drone on endlessly. Separate thoughts or topics were connected by the transcribers. Questions from listeners were often transcribed as if they were still the candidate speaking. In transcription, each person speaks in one unstoppable, incomprehensible flow. In the manuscripts, the opposite is true. The manuscripts also contained words, sentences, and even whole paragraphs that were later struck through, yet there was no trace of these in the transcriptions— except for a few instances where struck-through words were included, thus obscuring meaning. The modern transcribers sometimes omitted superscripted words, which altered and sometimes corrupted the meaning. Finally, the transcribers sometimes created new sentences at will, and sometimes ignored clear end stops to join two sentences. Baffled by this incongruity between the original manuscripts and the transcriptions, I wondered why the transcribers had made these editorial decisions. The manuscripts were clearly records of works in progress, carefully structured to show breaks between thoughts, iterations of spiritual seeking, nagging doubts, and new progress. Why transcribe them as blocks of text? Only the pressure of the assumption that they were records of relations, taken down as someone spoke, with no time to create paragraphs and use lots of punctuation, would lead someone to ignore the structure on the page and create a printed version that flowed out as one long, uninterrupted speech act.

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But if they were not relations, what were they? It became clear that these records were Shepard’s personal records of sessions of trial. Trial was an iterative process in the early New England Congregational churches in which people met repeatedly in conference with friends and fellow congregants, elders, and the minister to share their experiences and their progress toward understanding God’s will (and, hopefully, the discovery of assurance). Their listener(s) made “trial” of their statements, testing them through questioning.20 Sisters and brothers of the church who knew the candidate well might testify on their behalf. Everyone present had the opportunity to ask questions. At a session of trial, a candidate might eventually offer a rough draft, as it were, of their eventual relation, and they anticipated—and counted on—the thoughtful reactions of their advisers to confirm their statements or help them to reconsider them. John Fiske, the minister at Wenham and Chelmsford in the mid-1600s, described the system of trial in his own personal notebook in June 1656: [W]hen any such person [as] yet no member to any Church congregated orderly propounds himself[,] the same [will] be propounded to the Church privately, [where] Testimony concerning their life & conversation [will] be enquired into, sd persons be assigned to be joynd with the officer the day set & liberty for any other the brethren or sisters to be present at the first Tryall.

“The officer” who would oversee this step in the membership process was generally the minister, sometimes joined by an elder, and church members seemed to have exercised their “liberty” to participate. In fact, Fiske notes that on the same day this exact process was agreed upon by the church, “testimony was given touching John Nutting & his wife who had propounded themselves to or fellowship. viz. Isa: Lernet Simon Thomson Abram Parker.”21 Fiske’s reference to a “first” trial reveals that were usually multiple sessions, over which a candidate worked with church officers and lay members to reach a clear and convincing description of their spiritual assurance.22 Records follow in Fiske’s notebook of individuals being propounded to the church for membership, then scheduled for trial, and then received into the church after giving their relation. For instance, we see Brother Blogged’s wife propounded to the church on July 27, 1656; in August, unidentified persons gave testimony “of the conversation of Bro: Bloggeds wife, such as wch was satisfactory, & the 3d day set for the Tryal & Examination.” We can take this “trial and examination” to mean that the

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candidate was questioned (“examined”) by the minister and perhaps by the elders, and also by any other church members who either chose to attend or were asked by Mrs. Blogged to be present. On August 10, the trial and examination was held, and Mrs. Blogged was admitted into the church a week later, on August 17, 1656.23 Peter Thacher, minister in Milton, left brief notes: “Good-wife Keney came to speak with mee and gave an account of much workings of spirit toward the Lord and her desire to Injoy god in all his ordinances. I went to prayer with her and soe dismissed her”; “Father Vose came to my house and Brother Tucker soe I took them up into my study and went to prayer, Then father Vose told his Experiences and Brother Tucker and I were satisfied and I concluded with prayer.”24 Shepard himself references trial twice in a letter he wrote to minister Richard Mather in April 1636. Mather and his flock had attempted to gather as a Congregational church in the town of Dorchester, but the attending ministers, led by Shepard, called off the proceedings because they felt that the prospective members (except for Mather) had not presented convincing grounds for their salvation. In a long letter he wrote to Mather the next day, Shepard explained that he found “diverse weaknesses in most” and “three of them, chiefly, that I was not satisfied scarce in any measure with their profession of faith. Not but that I do believe upon your own trial of them—which, I persuade myself, will not be slightly in laying a foundation.” Later in the letter, Shepard urged Mather to revisit church formation once his people were better-prepared and recommended very careful vetting of prospective members, as “by this means others will not be too forward to set up on this work, who, after sad trial, will be found utterly unfit for it.”25 Clearly Shepard, whose church had been gathered just two months before the Dorchester attempt, under the new requirement of giving a convincing relation of God’s work upon the souls of prospective members, had used trial to sound out those members before attempting to gather the church. One convincing piece of evidence that the Shepard’s records are of sessions of trial is hidden in plain sight: they begin after a notebook page entitled “The Confessions of diverse propounded to be received and were entertained as members.” Selement and Woolley reasoned that if these people were accepted (“entertained”) as members, the records must be of the successful relations that resulted in membership. But the word “propounded” leaps out at us: Shepard is clearly tagging these records as those of people propounded for membership. He would not have done this if

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these were actual relations—he would have simply written “The Confessions of members.” Instead, we have the records of people who were, as Fiske put it, “propounded to the church privately” who then went through sessions of trial. Yes, they were eventually accepted as members, but the records that follow are of their trial sessions.26 I will show in Chap. 4 that these records were collected by Shepard into a notebook of doubt about the spiritual health of New England as a striking proof of the uncertainty and weakness of his flock: these people eventually found assurance, but their trial sessions convinced Shepard that their journeys were longer and more difficult than they should have been in a truly godly commonwealth. Just as he found Mather’s candidates for membership lacking in convincing proofs of assurance, so he found his own candidates lacking. By writing explicitly that these are the confessions of those propounded to be received, Shepard himself finally removes the possibility that these are relations. In the chronology of propoundment-trial-relation, Shepard’s records document trial. If it is easy to picture the tense scene McGiffert describes of Shepard, “quill pen poised,” at a live relation, it is at least as easy to imagine a different scene: seated together, perhaps in the meeting-house, perhaps in Shepard’s home, Shepard, and perhaps one or two other people, listen as a brother or sister speaks. Shepard takes notes, not in an official record-­ keeping capacity, but to document this individual’s story for his own reference. They may begin well, but as they approach the all-important moment of assurance, they falter. As the candidate’s narrative breaks down, Shepard records questions from the listeners or, as in the case of Ellen Greene, records those listeners stepping in unanimously to offer their own testimonies of her righteousness, which “testimonyes caryed it,” as Shepard wrote after the few short lines of Ellen’s narrative. Shepard recorded the pauses, the stops and starts, the places where people gave up, and the places where they began again. Not yet ready to give a relation, but fortified with advice and targets for prayer and meditation from their church family, the candidate leaves, to return another day for another session or to at last make their relation.27 This is much more hopeful than the dire picture that David D. Hall once painted, of “men and women [who] were listened to in silence by most of their neighbors, who went home year after year without ever qualifying for full membership. … Too much striving after grace, too much straining for assurance, could have sad consequences.”28 This was exactly the situation that sessions of trial were meant to forestall.

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Rather than deliver multiple failed relations, one could work out one’s salvation in a more private, more forgiving environment. Selement himself skirts the boundary of the idea that these are records of trial but does not see where his own argument is leading: [The] great strength [of the “Confessions”] is that Shepard faithfully recorded their testimonies, thus preserving the minds and experiences of his parishioners. He did not revise their public narrations, opting to miss a few words and phrases rather than risk editorial distortions. Or course, many of the laymen, probably testifying without notes and in fear of an embarrassing long pause, were like Nathaniel Sparrowhawk, an affluent landowner, who admitted: “I cannot remember many things which I cannot now express myself” … Other laymen, whose relations end abruptly, even sometimes in mid-sentence, may have been prompted by Shepard, who stopped writing in order to lead them with questions and answers. After all, these narrations served a didactic function, and Shepard wanted each one to be exemplary for the sake of both the confessor and the congregation.29

All of Selement’s rationales for the records as relations actually prove them to be records of trial. First, these cannot be faithful recordings of narratives when their language is so often compressed to meaninglessness. Next, to say that Shepard “opted to miss a few words and phrases” is a gross misrepresentation of the many fundamental gaps in his written record. Finally, to claim that writing in complete sentences would, for Shepard, be an “editorial distortion” is to claim that his parishioners were indeed so incoherent and inarticulate as to defy imagination. And as I will show in Chap. 2, long pauses were indeed common and fully represented by Shepard with clear spacing and punctuation, because they were not an “embarrassment” in a session of trial, but an open and honest communication of struggle. It is Selement who is embarrassed by them, and this is perhaps why he scrubbed them from his transcription. Meredith Neumann writes pauses into the relation as well: “Not all lapses in a confessor’s ability to provide particulars correspond to the early stages [of preparation] … the lacuna in John Sill’s narrative corresponds to the onset of assurance for the hopeful saint. After speaking ‘some of the promises that did stay me formerly and then,’ Sill admits that ‘there was more than I can now remember or call to mind.’”30 Long pauses would not be acceptable in a final relation; neither would saying “I cannot remember.” People simply could not say “I don’t remember” during an actual relation, in response to important questions about

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how they discovered God’s grace. One could only say that in private or semi-private sessions of trial. Sill’s forgetfulness was indeed manifested not during a relation, on the brink of assurance, but at an earlier stage of preparation, during a trial session with Shepard.31 I will illustrate this throughout, but particularly in Chap. 2 by closely reading of Isabell Jackson’s record, which is plagued with the same forgetfulness during trial—and dotted with the worried editorial comments this drew from the elders who met with her. Shepard’s notebooks contain a priceless record of the content of early Congregational sessions of trial—what people actually talked about, where they shone, and where they struggled. As records of trial, that content begins to make sense. Many records end abruptly, or begin well and then devolve into uncertainty. A few are stronger, more polished and complete all the way through; these represent either a very strong first trial or (more likely) a second or even a third session. Some of the Cambridge records seem to represent multiple trial sessions—in Isabell Jackson’s case, it is almost certain that we are reading the record of three separate trials. In these sessions, Shepard took rough notes of the narrative; since they were his personal notes, he could make them as compressed as he liked. He was the only person who needed to understand them, and so they could be little more than shorthand references to statements. His memory would fill in the blanks when necessary. As records of trial, the Cambridge records gain rather than lose in importance. They are glimpses into the process of puritan spiritual preparation, of very intimate and often gritty encounters between candidates, church officers, and lay members. They reveal the unfinished, in-progress seeking of average puritans in Cambridge, and the counsel they received not only from their minister but from their lay sisters and brothers (which they recount in their narratives).32 Shepard’s records of these intimate trial sessions provide a snapshot of seeking-in-progress, of people still working out their salvation.

The Question of Assurance Understanding Shepard’s records as records of trial also answers an important concern: why do the majority of the narratives fail to document assurance? It is crucial to understand that a Shepard-era Cambridge relation was only successful if it described assurance—closing with Christ. This was the necessary final result of the process of puritan spiritual preparation. It’s

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important to fully explain preparation, since the narratives are focused on moving through its stages.33 Preparation was the process by which puritans seeking to know whether God had granted them grace (salvation) through predestination prepared their soul to receive that knowledge. Preparation began with someone realizing their own sinfulness, and moved through iterative emotional cycles in response to this realization. At first, the person might be afraid of going to hell for their sinfulness. But then they might have the equal and opposite reaction of scorning the whole concept as fanatical religious nonsense. Then the fear recurred, leading them to take the step of praying or asking someone godly for help; thus began a long cycle of making progress toward the goal of preparing their soul for God’s will. A fully prepared soul was able to receive the all-­ important message from God about their salvation. This cycle was marked by repeated failures and backslidings and continuous doubt. For every moment of certainty and closeness to God, there might be two moments of gnawing doubt and the feeling of “deadness of heart,” as the Cambridge puritans so often put it.34 Doubt and failure were not signs of damnation—quite the contrary. A willingness to keep fighting the battle against sin was encouraging evidence that someone was sincerely motivated to get closer to God. This sincere motivation might well be a sign of grace.35 Being a hypocrite—going through the empty motions of preparation—was the greatest fear of the New England puritan; failing and admitting your spiritual failure and doubt was convincing proof that you were not just a hypocrite pretending to make progress. In fact, weakness, failure, and doubt were doors through which God could pour his consolation and power. As Shepard said, “God doth show his power by the much ado of our weakness to do anything … the more weak I, the more fit I to be used … When I was most empty, then by faith I was most full.” And Michael McGiffert notes that “these polarities were instrumentally connected in God’s soteriological strategy: for the saint to be raised up, the Old Adam had to be laid low. … In this dialectic of contrarieties resided the secret of assurance.”36 Failure, and the will to overcome it, moved the seeker closer to God. As the English puritan Katherine Sutton put it, “I can truly say from real experience that the worst weather I went through, the more of God I met.”37 The cycle of preparation ended only when God’s will was revealed. Ideally, God’s will was to grant the seeker salvation, which the puritans called assurance. This was an overpowering emotional and physical moment of union with Christ, in which he provided the individual with incontrovertible evidence of their salvation. The seeker was joined with Christ, never to be parted.

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They were assured of grace. Once a person received assurance, they could never again doubt their salvation, and their eternal future in Heaven. One of the most obvious features of most of the records in Shepard’s notebook, after their language compression, is the lack of a clear moment of assurance. To be very clear, I am not talking about moments of assurance that are then followed by more doubt and trial. That was a natural part of the soul-searching that took place after assurance to continue to bring the earthly saint ever closer to Christ before they were at last fully joined in Heaven. People who described assurance and its transcendent joy often followed this moment with accounts of deep despair and distance from God. This was not a fall from grace but a proof of it: only a soul that was united to Christ could perceive new levels of sinfulness—being closer to Christ made a person more aware of the distance that still remained between them. The closer to Christ one became, the more soul-­searching one performed, and the more awareness of sin one developed. Again, this was blessed evidence that one was not a hypocrite; in fact, persons with assurance were clearly avoiding the hypocrisy of believing they were perfect, and free of sin. Thomas Goodwin described this process well: “I knew no more of the work of conversion than these two general heads, that a man was troubled in conscience for his sins, and afterwards was comforted by the favor of God manifested to him.”38 Assurance brought both the certainty of grace and further soul-searching and grief over sin; as Mary Gookin of Cambridge put it, “I heard that assurance which makes us slacken our watch, tis not of God but Satan.”39 Being troubled for sin and comforted by assurance—the “favor of God manifested”—was the spiritual state puritans sought. It was the closest to God they could be on Earth. That said, most of the Cambridge records still do not describe assurance. They detail soul-searching and grief for sin, along with moments of hopefulness and joy, but not the overwhelming moment that removes forever the fear of eternal damnation and sets the seeker on a new path of moving ever closer to Christ. Many scholars, believing that these are records of successful relations of faith, are confounded by this fact.40 Many try to square this circle by claiming that Shepard was lenient with people who had not found grace—that he granted them church membership because they were hopeful that they would someday find assurance. In this theory, sincere belief and a hopeful feeling would be rewarded or encouraged with church membership, as this would strengthen the seeker on the path of preparation.41 This “mustard seed” theory seems to be confirmed by the pre-eminent New England Congregational minister John Cotton

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of Boston when he says “We refuse none for weaknesse, either in knowledge or grace if the whole be in them;” this has been interpreted to mean that someone without assurance could become a Congregational church member.42 But there is a crucial difference between granting church membership to someone whose assurance is relatively untested and fragile and granting it to someone who has no assurance at all.43 When Cotton refers to “weakness” he doesn’t mean the applicant has no assurance, but that their assurance is new, and fragile—vulnerable to its first bouts of doubt and despair. But it is present—it is “the whole” that is within them. If the applicant is not completely certain of their assurance, that is where trial comes in: an audience of saints will help the seeker to perceive whether or not assurance exists. If Shepard were to accept a relation without assurance, it would be disastrous to both the individual and the entire church.44 As Thomas Weld argued, “[some] upon due trial may be found too light, when weighted in God’s ballance, and its better for such to be discovered here, then hereafter, to their eternall ruine.” Weld also negates the “mustard seed” theory when he specifies that “…Where we see any breathings of Christ in any, we esteeme them as Christian, we love them dearely, and carry our selves accordingly to them and theirs, though not yet in Church fellowship with us[.] Where we see no grace as yet wrought, we labour in all meeknesse to bring them to Christ…”45 There may be “breathings of Christ” in a seeker, but they cannot enter into church membership until they possess clear assurance. Church members of Cambridge did not mistake someone hopeful for Christ with someone who had closed with him, and Shepard did not accept seekers without assurance as members out of pity or compassion.

Misreading Misery The lack of assurance in many of the records has led many scholars to describe them—and the speakers themselves, and their society—as thoroughly depressed. Andy Dorsey calls the speakers “dubious converts,” people who despaired of the possibility of assurance and turned away from its pursuit, choosing instead an endless spiritual self-flagellation that was approved or even mandated by their church and society.46 If this was the pinnacle of puritan preparation, if perpetual, unrelieved misery was the longed-for, ideal condition of the saint, then puritanism was indeed a bleak and inhumane religion. Shepard’s compressed language contributes

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to this mindset, as it has been read by most scholars as proof that Shepard’s candidates were so miserable as to be unable to express themselves at length—unable to speak clearly. This, in turn, is described as the end result of a long parallel process of stripping authentic human emotion out of the puritan soul, a deliberate deadening of the heart in an attempt to wean it from the love of earthly pleasures. Patricia Caldwell describes “Shepard’s saints” as people “whose emotions [were] almost never directly or simply expressed in [their] conversion stories.” She states that “the emotionalism of ‘tears’ is unwelcome [and] ‘brokenness within’ is the desired condition,” and concludes that [the] burden of a hard, dead heart is precisely what kept the saints in a deadlock of inexpressible pain … Burdened as well with strictures against too much emotional subjectivism … where were they to find an expansive, imaginative vocabulary, a lexicon of images, a dramatic vehicle to carry the weight of their experiences?47

The “seeming elision of emotional markers and subjective perspective” that “suggests an absence of interiority” that Neumann notes is affirmed by Caldwell, who concludes that the Cambridge records describe an inevitable misery “where disorientation and guilt paint the whole world gray, and where in their confusion they keep bumping into their own sinful selves.”48 The records we have, however, are indeed filled with strong emotion, as I will demonstrate. Indeed, most are dominated by lengthy descriptions of powerful bouts of joy, pain, hope, impatience, resolve, confusion, frustration, jealousy, despair, surprise, love, and excitement. The published transcriptions thwart our perception of many of these emotional moments by removing their physical markers from the page. Mrs. Crackbone’s record, for example, shows a hopeful narrative stopped dead by a sudden, painful memory of how her spiritual journey estranged her from her parents. Shepard sets this moment—“& so I wisht my parents knew mee;//”—apart on a single line, a mournful orphan on the page. Later in the same narrative, Mrs. Crackbone expresses a wild, joyful moment of excited hope as she watches her house burn down; she urges the flames on as she realizes “my Sp[irit] was fiery so to burne all I had; and h[ence I] prayed [Lord] would send fire of word and baptize me [with] fire, & since the [Lord] hath set my hart at liberty.”

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When we read the original manuscript records, these moments of strong emotion appear much more clearly. When we understand the compressed language of the records as Shepard’s personal shorthand rather than the actual finished speech of his flock, we regain a rational perception of the puritans of New England as articulate people who lived lives not entirely devoted to misery and despair. We recover their strong and heroic, detailed and emotional life stories.

Why Not Record the Actual Relations? If Shepard recorded sessions of trial as a way to document someone’s spiritual progress and remind himself of where one session ended and another began, why, then, did he not record their final, triumphant relation? The simplest answer may be that he did not formally record relations because he would not have seen any reason to do so.49 First, relations were considered semi-private, in that they were heard only by the gathered congregation. This was one of the reasons why women were allowed to make them even though this violated the Pauline prohibition on women speaking in church that the puritans upheld in other contexts, like church voting and committee work.50 If final relations were written down, the main reason would be for future reference and edification, and this would transform public speaking into printed edification—into formal teaching. Words captured for eternity gained the power to teach; they could be consulted as a form of means, like a sermon. This pushed women’s speaking into the forbidden realm of teaching men, but even more importantly, it violated the nature of a relation. While it was supposed to prove assurance, a relation was not supposed to be the final word on the candidate’s spiritual journey. It affirmed salvation, but the saint was meant to continue refining their soul and moving ever closer to Christ. A relation they gave in one year should not accurately represent their spiritual state the next year. The relation was transient, capturing the moment of assurance and allowing the saint to move into the post-­ assurance work of coming as close to Christ as was possible on Earth. Thus, there was no real need to write out a “perfect,” final relation of faith, and every reason to prohibit it. When candidates met for trial, to gauge and share their spiritual progress, Shepard wrote down their words for his own personal use. If a candidate came to him for private counsel, he could consult this record. Once the person gave their relation, the record of trial was put aside. The final product of a public relation was not

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a written artifact but a new saint—a person whose intangible spiritual identity was forever changed. Just as assurance was an intensely emotional and personal inner experience, so a relation was not a physical artifact—a piece of writing—but a verbal act transfused with spiritual power.51 Words spoken and heard in a live, transient moment best represented this spiritual event. Transforming and reducing this intangible, sensual event into a paper-and-ink record, frozen forever on the page, was not only unnecessary but inappropriate.52 I want to avoid giving the impression that because they were the end result of iterative conference and trial sessions, actual live relations were not extemporaneous and personal, heart-felt, and high-stakes. Relations were not merely over-rehearsed narratives from sessions of trial; as live public speaking, they must have been fundamentally different from private narratives that were attended by the minister, or perhaps a few other people.53 If, as Caldwell says, “the people of New England experienced some trauma when they were called upon to give a relation,” it would make sense to try to relieve some of that trauma by going through trial.54 Delivering an early version of a relation to the minister and supportive peers was preparation for delivering a relation to the church. Going forward, the Shepard records will be referred to as records of trial. As they stand on the page, these are not successful relations. Nor do they read like formal records. None of the explanations scholars give for their failure to describe assurance—namely, that assurance was impossible, or that spiritual self-flagellation was the only goal, or that Shepard was an easy grader—square with an objective study of Shepard’s approach to assurance and the actual content of the records. What does make objective sense is that the pages in Shepard’s notebooks read like early- or mid-cycle progress toward relations recorded by the minister in sessions of trial. By facilitating the admission of the fact that the narratives found on the pages of Shepard’s notebook are often not clear, often not complete, and often clearly unacceptable as final relations, this theory can help to bring clarity to our study of them, and help us to present a more logical and accurate picture of the people working toward church membership in early Cambridge.

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Overview Chapter 2: The main reason why the Shepard records of trial have not been recognized as such is that the only published transcriptions of them are fundamentally flawed and have therefore seriously obscured and interfered with the meaning of the original records. This realization alone powerfully challenges not only the two sets of transcriptions, but much of the outpouring of analysis based on those transcriptions that scholars have generated since their publication. I present my argument about the transcriptions and their unfortunate legacy for puritan and early American scholarship by close-reading the original manuscript records and the published transcriptions and providing side-by-side comparisons that emphasize the provocative departures from the primary sources that characterize the secondary literature. Chapter 3: Just as it is impossible to really understand Shepard’s records of trial without 1:1 transcriptions, it is impossible to really understand them without knowing how much they concern the unique final step in spiritual preparation that Shepard demanded of his congregants. As I read and re-read Shepard’s writings, it became clear to me that he, alone among his Congregational ministerial peers, did not consider lying prostrate in humiliation at the feet of God to be the final step in religious preparation. Instead, he elaborated on an idea described in passing by his father-in-law, the minister Thomas Hooker, to create an added step—a bold, unplanned, irresistible leap to the bosom of Christ.55 Passively waiting for God to act, to reveal his will, to draw the humbled sinner into his embrace, had no place in preparation for Shepard. He demanded action, in the form of grabbing hold of the beloved savior simply because one cannot help but to do so, and can do nothing else. This was for Shepard the close of preparation, the event that finally revealed one’s spiritual status of grace or damnation. Without it, one would languish forever at the feet of God, passively waiting for a judgment that would never come. This unique step was frightening for his congregation. Shepard himself described this leap as “importunate,” and it proved very difficult for most of his seekers to embrace. The constant references in the Cambridge records to this unique final leap have so far been ignored or undetected by existing scholarship, but it was indeed the primary cause of the difficult seeking that Shepard recorded, and what he viewed as the greatest proof of the failure of New England. Seekers in the records emphasize the difficulty of this final step

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and the anguish it provoked in them over and over again. I explain this novel step of preparation and its consequences for seekers in Cambridge. Chapter 4: No study of the Cambridge records can be undertaken without considering the context in which their records are found—the notebook of minister Thomas Shepard. Reading the pages that surround the records of trial therein was another revelation. I was astounded at the spirit of foreboding I found there. This notebook contains a great deal of related writing by Shepard—most pertinently, his brooding commentaries on New England, some of which I have not found published anywhere. Given this context, it seems clear that Shepard deliberately copied his records of trial, in which people were predominantly struggling to discover their state of grace, into this notebook to support and illustrate his fears for New England—fears he felt at a remarkably early stage of settlement. These records of difficult seeking illustrated, for him, not only his own shortcomings as a minister, but a fundamental rot at the core of the godly commonwealth. I explore Shepard’s corollary writing and the warning it sounded for Cambridge, Boston, and the Bay Colony as a whole. Chapter 5: The most exciting find in the Shepard manuscripts are the voices of the women of Cambridge. They reveal average seventeenth-­ century women who possessed deliberately created, strikingly powerful, confident, and independent spiritual identities that existed outside of, and were untrammeled by, their public lives as political second-class citizens. The most fundamental error made by scholars of these records has been their negative reading of these women’s records. Again, the faulty transcriptions play a starring role in this misinterpretation, as the words the women spoke are presented in unintelligible blocks of text. But their negative assumptions about puritan society and religion also set these scholars off on the wrong path: assuming that puritan women’s lives were lived in unrelieved oppression administered not only through sexist law and social norms but through a harsh and unfeeling religion has blinded scholars to these women’s obvious development of a separate, spiritual identity which was powerful, independent, and confident. This new spiritual identity existed parallel to their established political identity, and made few waves in the records of the political status quo.56 In New England, the vast majority of puritan women did not attempt to overthrow established socio-political norms. Instead, they poured their energy into upholding and extending the new religious norm of equality among the saints that was established so early on in the New England colonies. As one scholar puts it, “These women found themselves challenging patriarchy, without

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questioning their place within that system.”57 This norm  utterly transformed religion in New England, and gave puritan women in this region a vital agency, a heroic sense of their own spiritual power and importance, that is lacking in their Old English counterparts. We have only brief glimpses of the women who gave these narratives collected by Shepard. Like the bird in the medieval image who flies out of the dark night into the brightly lit mead hall and is briefly seen, then disappears again into the darkness as it flies out another window, these women fly into the light of history, are seen for a moment, and then disappear. But they certainly seized that moment. Serving women, elderly widows, young wives and mothers, daughters of powerful men—all told stories of heroic seeking that feature their independent labor in reading, praying, listening, asking questions, and making meaning in a world narrowed down to just the seeker and her God. Only a handful of the women’s records mention any kind of traditional female identity as wives, mothers, or daughters. Most, if read blind, cannot be identified belonging to a man or a woman. This astounding fact has been completely ignored by scholars. The heroic souls we encounter in these women’s records labor in secret, in jealously guarded, deliberate solitude. They make decisions, they make demands. They consult powerful men and consider their advice, then use or dismiss it as they see fit. They refuse any attempt to be dictated to by ministers, fathers, elders, or husbands. In these records, the women of Cambridge create multiple identities for themselves, and prioritize their spiritual identity over those of wife and mother and daughter. Alone, as individuals, these women face the final, unusual step in spiritual preparation that Shepard required of his congregants—moving from humiliation to an audacious reaching out for Christ. Fierce and uncompromising, full of doubt and failings and sin, these individual women are above all important. The heroic soul has all of God’s attention, all of her church’s attention, all of her own attention. She is free to focus on herself. She is in this way an existential hero. No one but God can tell her what is right or wrong, no one but God controls her destiny, no one but God has her ear. Her right to position herself in direct relation to God is unalienable.58 This book is called “heroic souls” because I want to honor and call out the determined, passionate, informed, and individualistic spiritual seeking of the people of early Cambridge, as found in their clear, thoughtful, self-­ actualized narratives. These people, and particularly these women, inspire me deeply. Their fiery, intensely personal narratives should encourage scholars of women’s studies and early America at large to investigate the

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wealth of hitherto lost Congregational manuscripts, including actual relations, that are coming to light in the twenty-first century.59 This book allows the seekers of Cambridge to speak as they once did, clearly and intensely, about their own lives and their spiritual identities that transcended time and space, life and death. The alleged difficulties of their speaking are a problem of modern transcription that has generated a great deal of writing about the supposed spiritual stunting of those speakers. By revealing the actual clarity of their statements, we remove the layers of interpretation, misinterpretation, and commentary that distance us from the moment of counsel and real people speaking about what was real to them. By driving our focus back to the actual manuscripts and the decisions, moments, breaks, starts, and stops that they include, we can find fresh meaning in documents that have already attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, and bring that meaning to a wide audience by locating the importance of these records not primarily in what they offer to scholarly meta-readings but in the immediate lives and passions they describe, the intimate moments they were born in, and the super-charged energy for change, discovery, and meaning that they embrace.

Notes 1. Morgan, “New England Puritanism,” 237. The main assumption Morgan wanted to test was whether there was “actually a decline in the number of church members during the seventeenth century,” and whether that decline was caused, as scholars insisted, by a decline in puritan religious fervor and confidence. 2. Rutman devoted his article to supporting the established hypothesis that the second and third generation of puritan settlers in New England lost their religious way, falling back into the sinful world and letting the “bridge which the Winthrops and Cottons were attempting to build between this world and the next” collapse. That declension (lack of interest in, respect for, or confidence about religion) was the source of falling numbers of church members was a fact, according to Rutman, and he produced many types of records to back the claim. Darren B.  Rutman, “God’s Bridge Falling Down: ‘Another Approach’ to New England Puritanism Assayed,” The William and Mary Quarterly 19, No. 3 (July 1962): 410. Morgan would respond with a Letter to the Editor in the October 1962 issue in which he mildly claimed Rutman had mistaken his point and reiterated his question about the reasons behind declining numbers of church members

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in ­seventeenth-­century New England. Edmund S. Morgan, “New England Puritanism,” 642–644. 3. Rutman, “God’s Bridge,” 408. 4. Thus the Cambridge records provide that “historical voyeurism” that records of relations, which could be more formal, cannot. David R. Como, “Women, Prophecy, and Authority in Early Stuart Puritanism,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 61, No. 2 (1998): 207. Susan Juster describes this as “men and women caught in a moment of intense self-scrutiny and self-­ assessment.” Susan Juster, “‘In a Different Voice’: Male and Female Narratives of Religious Conversion in Post-Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly, 41, No. 1 (March 1989): 37. 5. For a concise description of this requirement, which was unique to New England, see David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990), 12–14. The first anecdotal evidence of New England puritans giving relations of faith in the course of, or as a requirement for, church membership comes from Roger Clap of Dorchester, who described “many in their Relations [speaking] of their great Terrors and deep Sense of their lost Condition.” Roger Clap, Memoirs of Roger Clap. 1630 (Boston: David Clapp, 1844) 24, https://archive.org/details/memoirsofrogercl00clap/ page/n10/mode/2up. Clap describes people testifying to “God’s Work on their Souls,” which sounds like the usual practice of lay prophesying— non-­clergy standing up in the meeting-house after a sermon and sharing its impact on them, or any other “exhortation” that inspired them. The puritans developed this tradition of laypeople praying, prophesying, and even preaching when reformed, properly “orthodox” puritan ministers were scarce. Qualified puritan laymen could do everything a minister was authorized to do except preside over the sacrament of communion. Women were not allowed to speak aloud in church, so it is surprising when Clap describes “Men and Women, young and old … confessing their faith publickly.” John Winthrop wrote in his journal that in December 1633, when John Cotton became minister at the church in Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, “Divers profane and notorious evil persons came and confessed their sins and were comfortably received into the bosom of the Church. Yea, the Lord gave witness to the exercise of prophesy, so as thereby some were converted and others much edified.” Richard S.  Dunn & Laetitia Yeandle, eds., The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–1649 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996): 61. The connection Winthrop makes between lay prophesying and church membership was never made explicit by John Cotton himself, and in fact, documents instituting relations of faith as part of the requirements of Congregational church membership have not yet been found. Edmund S.  Morgan’s hypothesis that “[i]n the absence of

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further evidence it is impossible to tell whether the Boston church at this time demanded that candidates describe their conversion, but it may be that Cotton’s religious revival prompted converts, before admission to the church, voluntarily to narrate the experiences that led them to the step. … Whatever the practices of the Boston church in 1634, by the next year a number of ministers, whether prompted by Cotton or by their own reasoning, had decided that evidence of a work of grace in the heart, or in other words, saving faith, was a necessary qualification for church membership.” Morgan notes that in that next year, 1635, the Hooker congregation left Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony, for the Connecticut River Valley, and in 1636 Thomas Shepard and his flock gathered the church anew; they asked neighboring ministers for guidance and were told that “such as were to join should make confession of their faith, and declare what work of grace the Lord had wrought in them.” Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1963): 98–100. Patricia Caldwell traces these origins and makes a fruitful comparison to developments in the English puritan church in the “Origins” chapter of her classic book The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983). 6. A few records of seventeenth-century relations each from John Fiske in Wenham and Michael Wigglesworth in Malden, and then the sixty-seven from Shepard in Cambridge, made up the entirety of seventeenth-century relations widely available to scholars before NEHH began. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990): 119–120. 7. “There is an earlier record of the church in existence covering part of Rev. Thomas Shepard’s ministry. This is now in the custody of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. The officers of this society have refused permission to copy it. It is the record written by Rev. Thomas Shepard of the experiences related by those who wished to join the church.” Stephen Paschall Sharples, S.B., ed., Records of the Church of Christ at Cambridge in New England, 1632–1830 (Boston: Eben Putnam, 1906): iv. 8. The puritans believed in predestination—that eons before God created the universe he decided the fate of every individual who would ever live, granting some salvation and reserving damnation to the vast majority. So the puritans’ task was not to attempt to earn salvation, as they believed some Protestants attempted to do, or to buy it, as they believed Catholics tried to do, or to ask for it, as they believed the Arminians did (this third way eventually winning out in the mid-nineteenth century to become the mainstay of modern Protestant Christianity). The puritan’s task was to discern God’s will, to hear God speaking his choice through his word, the Bible, through prayer, and through the words of godly ministers. One had

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to discover whether one had been granted salvation. If the happy discovery of salvation was made, then a person “closed with Christ,” finding “assurance” of God’s grace (what later Christianity called “salvation”). Then the rest of their life was spent in trying to move ever closer to Christ, to do his will as much as possible on Earth until fully united with him in Heaven. 9. For “non-separating Congregationalists … the church, once organized was ‘to be informed, directed and guided by the Pastor chiefly …’” with the pastor and “grave assistant Elders” in complete control and the congregation “striving rather ‘freely to consent to their Guides preparing & directing every matter’ … If the clergy failed to control the internal affairs of their churches, then [those churches] would inevitably drift apart, divergences and schisms appear, and popular frenzies break out. … Though a church properly began with the people, and though a ministry could not exist until the people had themselves ordained it, yet newly associated members could not linger to congratulate each other upon the power they had acquired, but immediately must subject themselves to the rule of proper superiors. … The congregations retained no ‘residual powers’; their existence simply was prerequisite to the ministers’ opportunity ‘to do that which they themselves cannot do.; … the primary condition of their becoming seated in a [church] corporation was that they formally enslave their will to the revealed Word of God, and the revealed Word required them to nominate a fitting man upon whom Christ and not themselves should bestow the authority they were to obey.” Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts 1630–1650 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1933): 174, 179, 180. Scholars in the decades since Miller have begun to rethink this description; see David D. Hall’s proofs in his chapter “Godly Rule” that while “Samuel Stone, the minister at Hartford, described the workings of church government as ‘a speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent democracy’ [this] was not how governance functioned in Stone’s own congregation.” and that New England ministers joined with their congregations in deliberately limiting ministerial power and encouraging “saints empowered.” David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2011). 10. As Mary Cappello puts it, in these records we hear “the interpenetration of public and private voice—here, the communal speaks through the church member who speaks through the transcribing pen of the preacher.” Mary Cappello, “The Authority of Self-Definition in Thomas Shepard’s ‘Autobiography and Journal,’” Early American Literature 24, No. 1 (1989): 35. This stands in contrast to George Selement’s premise that “laymen whose relations end abruptly, even sometimes in mid-sentence, may have been prompted by Shepard, who stopped writing in order to lead them with questions and reminders. After all, these narrations served a

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didactic function, and Shepard wanted each one to be exemplary for the sake of both the confessor and the congregation.” George Selement, “The Meeting of Elite and Popular Minds at Cambridge, New England, 1638–1645,” The William and Mary Quarterly 41, No. 1 (January 1984): 35. Emphasis added. 11. Meredith Neumann assumes this, saying “Thomas Shepard famously recorded the spiritual narratives of his congregants seeking membership in the Cambridge church in a single notebook” and “As a woman, [Jane Wilkinson] Winship probably delivered her confession in front of Shepard and a small group of elders.” The possibility that these were not the final, formal relations is not broached. Meredith Neumann, Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013): 174, 182. Charles Cohen says that the records’ “unpolished appearance chronicles the spontaneity of the original event and the excitement of preachers trying to keep pace with confessors.” Charles Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): 140. Selement and Woolley state that “distracting redundancies” in the records are “probably a result of the speed at which Shepard had to take down the relations.” George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley, eds. Thomas Shepard’s Confessions (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1981): 28. Sarah Rivett has also claimed that relations demonstrate “the denial of the speaker’s authority, as it was delivered in a spirit of submission to the discerning authority of the elect and ministerial judges.” Sarah Rivett, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011): 97. Rivett and Stephanie Kirk say that “men as well as women publicly performed an act of self-discovery in order to orally translate the evidence of grace recorded upon their souls into communal knowledge. Between 1638 and 1645, Thomas Shepard recorded several such testimonies in his church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett, “Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas,” Early American Literature 45, No. 1, Special Issue: Methods for the Study of Religion in Early American Literature (2010): 72. David Hall says that “a woman [Ellen Greene] began to make her relation to his congregation but faltered and fell silent soon after she began.” Hall, A Reforming People, 170. Daniel Shea also describes Shepard as writing down the relations as they were spoken, and “subsequently, he committed these oral narratives to writing under the title ‘The Confessions of diverse propounded…” Daniel B. Shea, Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988): 140. 12. Michael McGiffert, ed., God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972): 136–7.

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13. Mary Rhinelander McCarl, “Thomas Shepard’s Record of Religious Experience, 1648–1649,” The William and Mary Quarterly 48, No. 3 (July 1991): 434. 14. Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett state, “In contrast to the transparency of the male-witnessing subject who replicates a waxlike impression of his introspective practice of self-scrutiny through the testimonial form, first-­ generation women perform a reluctance to claim the signs of grace as their own autonomous discovery, and to be reliable witnesses to the evidence of their own soul. … New England women defer consistently to the minister’s help in discerning their own signs of grace.” Kirk and Rivett, “Religious Transformations,” 74. 15. On my second reading, I went through and wrote “yes” or “no” after each person’s record to note whether the person speaking had found assurance and only a handful earned a “yes.” I have lost count of how many times I’ve read the Cambridge records, but some of the pages of my copy of Selement and Woolley are still covered in post-it notes filled with my own attempted gloss of their meaning. 16. The spirit of the nineteenth-century description of the later set of Shepard records as “visits to prisoners,” likely based on a quick scan of the many individuals recorded bewailing their sin and spiritual “crimes,” remained mostly intact through the years that followed, up to the present day. Andrew Delbanco chose the title The Puritan Ordeal for his book on the beliefs and material circumstances of the puritans. Michael J. Colacurcio’s hostile take on Thomas Shepard is extreme only in the openness of his expressions of contempt for its puritan subject (Michael J. Colacurcio, “A Strange Poise of Spirit: The Life and Deaths of Thomas Shepard,” Religion & Literature 32, No. 1 (Spring 2000). 17. Douglas Winiarski noted in 2009 that “two decades ago” Charles Cohen “posited a spiritual equality in Reformed theology that rendered ‘androgynous’ the language that laymen and laywomen deployed in the oral church admission testimonies recorded by Cambridge [minister] Shepard.” Sadly, as I will show in Chap. 5, since then there has been a wealth of effort poured into tweezing out minute differences between the male and female records from Cambridge, and almost none devoted to exploring this remarkable fact. Later in his chapter Winiarski notes a minor difference between mid-­eighteenth-­century conversion narratives but then concludes that this data “offers a warning to scholars who would push the notion of gender difference too far in their interpretation of church admission narratives…” Douglas L.  Winiarski, “Gendered ‘Relations’ in Haverhill, Massachusetts, 1719–1742,” in In Our Own Words: New England Diaries, 1600 to the Present – Volume 1: Diary Diversity, Coming of Age, ed. Peter

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Benes, Vol 31, Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar of New England Folklife (Boston: Boston University, 2009), 60, 76. 18. Lori Rogers-Stokes, “Making Sense of the Shepard Conversion Narratives,” The New England Quarterly 89, No. 1 (March 2016). Like Morgan, I was published in the “Memoranda and Documents” section. 19. Mary Rhinelander McCarl, “Thomas Shepard’s Record of Religious Experience, 1648–1649,” The William and Mary Quarterly 48, No. 3 (July 1991): 434. 20. McGiffert notes that final relations were not the work of a day, but does not recognize them as the end result of sessions of trial: “We know these [relations] were not impromptu performances; they had been practiced at home, coached by the minister, and vetted by senior saints. The confessors tell us, too, that they had sometimes shared their spiritual problems with other ministers, relatives, and friends.” McGiffert, God’s Plot, 137. Elizabeth Reis notes that “Conversion narratives represented the last measures taken before individuals were allowed to join a church,” then describes the process of trial, referring to relations as the “final test” of the candidate. Elizabeth Reis, “Seventeenth Century Conversion Narratives,” in Religions of the United States in Practice, Volume 1, ed. Colleen McDannell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 22, 23. 21. Extracts from the Notebook of the Rev. John Fiske, 1637–1675 (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1989), reprinted by HardPress Publishing, 11. Fiske’s records are fascinating because they include in detail relations that were part of “second propoundings.” People dismissed from other Congregational churches in New England who wished to join the church in Wenham were asked to give a relation of faith even though they had already done so in their original church. Thus many of the narratives Fiske records are not true relations of faith but forms of trial session in which people gave the relation they had given in their previous church, took questions from Wenham representatives, were considered by the church, and then, if approved, allowed to give a new, slightly updated, relation to the Wenham church. This method of being “twice propounded” was controversial, as it seemed to question the good practice of other Congregational churches, but Wenham stuck by it; as Fiske noted on November 10, 1644: “The grounds of the second propounding seemed, viz. to free the church’s practice in receiving in members from just exceptions to such as are without, to offer an occasion of further discourse of the party propounded whether from such as not members of such, as members of other churches. Hear the second propounding and after it a fortnight’s time before they are called forth to the relation of public trial.” The five women who first underwent second propounding, including the minister’s wife Anne Fiske, all did so on November 1, 1644, and were accepted on November 17.

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Phineas Fiske’s unnamed wife went through a prolonged trial on November 30, 1645, enduring questions and objections from her listeners, and the session was adjourned. A new session began on December 5, a day of humiliation, whereat Mistress Fiske “made her confession, particularly of the evil by her speeches of her husband and against the church and pastor. It was voted satisfactorily.” She was received into covenant that day. Generally, people who successfully made their second relation after second propounding were received the following Sunday. Robert G.  Pope, ed., Volume 47: The Notebook of the Reverend John Fiske, 1644–1675 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1974), 20, 42–43, 45. https://www. colonialsociety.org/node/1071 22. In an entry for October 22, 1644, Fiske notes specifically that the church decided that in the case of “receiving in members that were not yet of any church,” there had to be more than one session of trial: “Whether the pastor was to propound such persons upon a sole or single trial? Resolved that it would be neither safe, comfortable, nor honorable so to proceed. Hereupon voted that Brother Read should be joined with the pastor in taking the first trial of such members and with both of their consents they are to be propounded.” Pope, Volume 47: The Notebook of the Reverend John Fiske, 17. 23. Pope, Volume 47: The Notebook of the Reverend John Fiske, 12–13. 24. In Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Williamsburg: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982): 152; see more examples through p. 155. Hambrick-Stowe also records Samuel Sewall’s sessions of trial with Peter Thacher’s father at Third Church in Boston in January 1677; Sewall “mentioned my desire of communion with his Church, rehearsed to him some of my discouragements, as, continuance in Sin, wandering in prayer. … At my coming away [Thacher] said he thought I ought to be encouraged.” 25. Emphasis added. Quoted in John A.  Albro’s Introduction to Thomas Shepard, The Sincere Convert and The Sound Believer (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1999): cxxviii-cxxix. 26. Ironically, Charles Cohen, who aided Selement and Woolley with their transcription and states at one point in his own later book God’s Caress that the records are of relations, opens the door to the possibility that the Cambridge records are of trial instead: “Selement and Woolley… misrepresent the procedural differences between Hooker and Shepard… They allege that Hooker ‘examined his Hartford candidates in the privacy of his study,’ whereas Shepard required a relation ‘before the entire Cambridge congregation,’ but this assertion confuses two separate steps. Both Hooker’s ruling elders and Shepard’s (perhaps in his presence) conducted

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private screenings in the weeks before the relation.” Charles Cohen, God’s Caress, 143. Italics in original. 27. The brevity of many of the records has led scholars to posit that Shepard instituted a ban on lengthy relations. This is hard to justify for a few reasons. First, when those scholars were writing, they did not have a lot of examples of relations to compare and contrast with the Cambridge narratives—short as compared with what? If we compare them to the English (see Chap. 3), their content is clearly different, and it’s clear that different expectations made the English ones longer. Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 26, 34–35. Next, it is not possible that a mere paragraph could pass as a full relation; as we see in an imagined exchange written by Richard Mather to explain why the Congregational church demanded relations, while the apostolic church did not: “[Objection] But yet there would not be such long narrations [in the apostolic church] when each one makes a good long speech, in the profession of his Faith and Repentance. [Answer] … we deny not but they [those apostolic relations] might be briefer, because there was not such need that they should be long in regard of some difference between them and us, their time and ours … we need more time to hear, and try the soundness of men’s repentance towards God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ. [In] our times in New England … there is more need now to be more studious in examination of men’s estates when they offer themselves for Church members…” Richard Mather, An Apologie of the churches in New-England …, 29–30, https:// quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A50245.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;vie w=fulltext 28. David D.  Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990): 131. William Rathband offered a similarly negative description of a scene he had never witnessed from his seat in England, of “the stronger that can speake better, may grow in spirituall pride of their own abilities, and contempt of those that are weaker. In the weaker, envie at those that doe better than themselves, and discouragement, being afraid to offer themselves to triall, because they know not whether they shall be judged fit or no …” William Rathband, A briefe narration …, 9, https://play.google.com/books/read er?id=1PFBAAAAcAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1. Hall would later soften his view, noting that “well before they immigrated, most of the colonists had become versed in the repertory of private meetings, conventicles, and fast days that sustained those who affiliated with the godly. The textures of this training are strikingly apparent in the lay ‘relations’ or religious experience made by men and women in Thomas Shepard’s congregation.” David D. Hall, A Reforming People, 73.

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29. George Selement, “The Meeting of Elite and Popular Minds at Cambridge,” 34–35. Interestingly, in the Confessions Selement and Woolley note that “a candidate for church membership first arranged for a semiprivate interview at the home of one of the elders of the congregation. At that informal meeting the candidate … at the elder’s request, made ‘known unto them [the congregation] the worke of grace’ upon his soul.” Of course, it would be impossible to stuff “the congregation” into the home of an elder, and Selement and Woolley’s decision to interpret “them” as “the congregation” shows the power of their belief that the records were of relations. Selement and Woolley, eds. Thomas Shepard’s Confessions, 18. 30. Neumann, Jeremiah’s Scribes, 177. 31. Rachel Trocchio reveals the deep importance of memory to the puritans, the intense debates over its purpose and uses in England, and its crucial role in preparation and claims of assurance as described by Thomas Hooker in New England: “Remembering is this ‘swimming,’ the labour by which a person makes his or her way to land only by passing through, with arduous repetition, what he has gone through before.” Repeating what one has heard is not the same as remembering it, for the application of memory is the application of analysis and meaning-making. Memory for Hooker and the puritans in New England was interpretation and computation, without which there could be no understanding of God’s grace or claims of assurance. Rachel Trocchio, “Memory’s Ends: Thinking as Grace in Thomas Hooker’s New England,” American Literature 90, Number 4 (December 2018), 703, 707. 32. This insight into lay counsel is invaluable. Francis Bremer describes the powerful role of lay counsel in the Congregational church in Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism, and it is there that Bremer also states, clearly and persuasively, if only in passing, that the records that Selement and Woolley and McCarl transcribed are not records of live, final relations given to win church membership: “The ‘confessions’ gathered by Thomas Shepard in a notebook during the period from roughly 1638–1645 are examples of laymen and laywomen sharing religious experiences. They have been viewed by historians as part of the requirements specified by Shepard for those who wished to join his church. [But] Thomas Welde [acknowledged] that private meetings were held, categorizing them not as admission tests, but as ‘meetings of the Saints, for such an holy end.’ [Seeing] the Shepard ‘confessions’ in this light would help explain the hesitant nature of many of the recorded relations. … the ‘confessions’ attest to the important role that fellow believers played in each other’s progress towards faith and assurance.” Francis J. Bremer, Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 83–84. Bremer notes that “In

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light of this it is striking that the modern editors of the ‘confessions’ [Selement and Woolley] point out that ‘Unfortunately, there is little evidence in the Confessions to indicate that the relations of faith were actually given in public.’” 33. See David Kobrin, “The Expansion of the Visible Church in New England: 1629–1650,” Church History, 36 (June 1967), 192–94 for a concise description of the stages of preparation. Not all scholars are careful to be accurate in their description of the goal of preparation or the event of conversion, stating that grace came at the end of preparation as if it was a guaranteed conclusion. “Conversion” for the puritans of New England meant the realization that grace had been granted to an individual by God. It did not mean that if someone went through a thorough spiritual preparation they would receive grace as a result. One prepared to know one’s spiritual status—saved or not. One did not go through preparation in order to be converted, or to somehow bring about one’s own salvation. See examples in Selement and Woolley, eds. Thomas Shepard’s Confessions, p. 2, and Susan Juster, “In a Different Voice,” 34. 34. Patricia Caldwell says that “… in New England conversion stories, [the] narrators do not know how to account for the fact that the selves whose stories they are telling suffer guilt, depression [and] ‘deadness,’ and there is no acceptable external object in which to embody these feelings except the whole ‘situation’ in which they find themselves.” Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 61. As I will show throughout, the Cambridge narrators could account for their deadness and recounted their battles to overcome it in great detail, for victories represented coming closer to Christ. 35. “Turning does not inhere in a single event; it stretches out through a lifetime of faithful discipline.” This is Charles Cohen’s masterful summation of the preparation cycle before and after assurance. See the full description above this quote. Charles Cohen, God’s Caress, 7. 36. Michael McGiffert, God’s Plot, 24. Perry Miller noted the simultaneous humility and self-confidence of Puritan logic in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983): 439. 37. Katherine Sutton, A Christian Womans Experience of the glorious working of Gods free grace (Rotterdam: Goddaeus, 1663), p.  3. Sutton was an Englishwoman who did not make the trip to New England and wrote out her own relation after our time period, but hers is one of the few English relations to bear a strong resemblance to a Cambridge narration and is thus useful to include here. 38. Francis J. Bremer, “‘To Tell What God Hath Done for Thy Soul’: Puritan Spiritual Testimonies as Admission Tests and Means of Edification,” The New England Quarterly 87.4 (December 2014): 652, 629.

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39. McCarl, “Thomas Shepard’s Record,” 459. 40. I must acknowledge my own failure to address this question in my own article, in which I confidently stated that “All of the Shepard narratives provide proofs of assurance, though they may be hard for modern readers to recognize.” My realization that the language of assurance was hard to ­decipher for modern readers led me to make this false statement, as I decided that those records that did not show assurance actually did, if only I were a better reader. I gave those failed records the benefit of a doubt— exactly what I said Shepard would not do: “The commonly expressed notion that Thomas Shepard was an ‘easy grader’ of narratives, compassionately accepting people who showed little or no evidence of assurance and conversion, is based [on] negative misreadings.” In my article I list some of those negative misreadings; I also crucially hedge a little, changing my confident statement that all of the relations show assurance to “almost all.” I wish I had listened to my doubt about this. Rogers-Stokes, “Making Sense of the Shepard Conversion Narratives,“5, n. 6. 41. Selement and Woolley state that “Shepard was lax in his admissions standards, a laxity which is startling in view of the alleged severity of the Bay Colony admission practices. … Shepard simply did not force prospective members to demonstrate that they had closed with Christ, that is, to demonstrate a personal certainty about their salvation.” Selement and Woolley, eds., The Confessions, 22, 23. Patricia Caldwell notes that “only the minimal stirrings of one’s ‘first conversion,’ as Thomas Shepard called it, were expected [to] be exhibited by those who would join the gathered churches. First conversion involved ‘the least breathings’ of the Holy Spirit.” Caldwell interprets this to mean that “applicants … were to be treated leniently.” But Shepard refers to first conversion—the applicant must describe a closing with Christ. The important thing for both Cotton and Shepard was that the applicant did have assurance. No one was allowed membership without assurance simply in the hope that one day they might find it. As Perry Miller puts it, church member audiences for narratives did not mistake the “natural perturbations of the unregenerate for the stirrings of authentic grace.” Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 77; Miller, The New England Mind, 29. Thomas Weld said “we accept Christians of the lowest form, and never reject any for want of parts of eminency of grace, if we can discern in them a heart smitten with sense of sin and need of Christ joined with a blameless conversation, though very weak in knowledge and faith.” That “sense of sin and need of Christ” is one of the two crucial components of the conversion morphology: an utter reliance on God’s help rather than one’s own abilities. Thus Weld makes the very important distinction here, for only those with assurance had this realization that their own sin made it impossible for them to achieve anything

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through “means.” Thomas Weld, An Answer to W.R., His Narration (London: 1644), 17–18. See a good definition of “godly conversation” in Jane Kamensky, “Talk Like a Man: Speech, Power, and Masculinity in Early New England,” Gender & History 8 No. 1 (April 1996), 28. 42. Quoted in Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 93. Charles Hambrick-Stowe goes further, stating that “The criterion for membership that comes out in most of the confessions is full repentance for sin. The narratives tend to reach their climax at this point, and hope for future growth in the joy of grace was founded on such preparation. … When a person [could] say ‘then I saw the Lord had begun,’ the doors to church membership opened.” Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 87, 89. 43. “Puritans took the new birth in John 3.3 literally; Saints begin their spiritual life with infantile capacities. … Spiritual growth requires the constant exercise of faith.” Charles Cohen, God’s Caress, 103. 44. Winship makes this point when he says that Shepard required “confessions of faith [and] conversion narratives” of himself and six others when his church was gathered in Cambridge in February 1636. I disagree with his ensuing argument that this was to establish strict “doctrinal orthodoxy”; there was a difference between confessions of faith, or “owning the covenant,” and making a successful relation. The former required only doctrinal knowledge, the latter required evidence (as far as humanly possible) of assurance. This is why Richard Mather’s church-gathering in Dorchester two months later was aborted, at Shepard’s recommendation; as Winship notes, Shepard specifically faulted three relations of faith as potentially inadequate. That is, they did not offer convincing proofs of assurance. But then Winship states that “Neither Mather nor his congregation realized that what was expected was something other than accounts of the various methods by which they found assurance. Instead they were to produce narratives of their conversions, something that English critics of New England insisted would be a hard thing for many genuine Christians ever to do, let alone when the expectation was not clear to begin with.” But this does not hold together: if one could give an account of the way in which they had found assurance, that in itself is a “narrative of their conversion,” or relation. The one record we have of the aborted Dorchester gathering specifically notes doubts about the relations of three of the men involved, not their doctrinal orthodoxy. There was a world of difference between the two. Anyone could learn the rules and parts of reformed doctrine. Not everyone could give a successful relation, which is what mattered most. Michael P.  Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002): 72–3. 45. Thomas Weld, An Answer to W.R., 23. Emphasis added.

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46. Andy Dorsey, “A Rhetoric of American Experience: Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge Confessions and the Discourse of Spiritual Hypocrisy,” Early American Literature 49.3 (2014): 632–33, 635–36. 47. Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 167. 48. Neumann, Jeremiah’s Scribes, 184, Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 167–8. 49. Shepard would not be alone in this: “The procedures for entering a church were set down by numerous observers, but since the actual happenings were not so dutifully transcribed, their reconstruction is necessarily partial.” Charles Cohen, God’s Caress, 148. Cohen notes in a footnote on the same page that Dedham’s church records claim that particular professions (relations) “‘remaine in private notes,’ & were too large heere to be inserted.” This mention of “private notes” could have two meanings: the people listening to the relations, rather than the minister, took notes on what was said or that the notes were “private” because these Dedham records were actually records of trial. 50. Thomas Weld replies to William Rathband’s scandalized cry that “everyone that is admitted is brought before the whole Church (though never so many) to make their Declarations in publike … [how can we be] so harsh in our dealing, as not to betrust the Elders and some private men with their examinations” by saying “we have seene such a tender respect had to the weaker sex (who are usually more fearefull & bashfull) that we commit their trial to the Elders & some few others in private, who upon their testimony are admitted into the Church, without any more adoe … frequently.” Thomas Weld, An Answer to W.R., 18–19. The word “frequently” is important. It tells us that it was not required or expected of women to let an elder read their relation for them. I agree with Patricia Caldwell that the minister of each church probably influenced this issue and that Shepard clearly expected women in Cambridge to give their own relations from their own mouths. Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 50, n. 16. The report of Edward Johnson that women never gave their own relations in the Watertown church may be an example of a minister, in this case Thomas Carter, curbing women’s free expression—though Johnson begins his observation by stating that “some men cannot speak publikely to edification through bashfulness, [and so] the less is required of such.” Edward Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, J.  Franklin Jameson, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910): 217. 51. “Puritan spirituality was an affair of the mouth and ear.” Jane Kamensky, “Talk Like a Man,” 27. 52. “The relative rarity of such occasions make them all the more precious and their impact all the stronger. To hear these testimonies was to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit; these were moments that affirmed the church as

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spiritual community.” Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 118. Hall makes clear the rarity of publication of relations, much later in the century, in the 1680s and 1690s, by noting a few individual relations published much later, after the death of the persons who gave them, by their friends and family members as a tribute (p. 130). Susan Juster notes that in the late eighteenth century, “the motive for publishing these once private accounts of conversion was clearly pedagogical”; the same would have been true, I believe, in the seventeenth century. Juster, “In a Different Voice,” 35. It’s ironic that the Selement and Woolley publication of the records has led virtually all scholars to think of, and describe them, as “texts” designed to be read and considered as literature. One example can stand for all: “The conversion narrative, a text which recounts a process of confessional change or spiritual awakenings, is recognised as being one of the most dynamic literary forms associated with early modern religious culture. … often composed by men and women [and] designed to provoke a further change on the part of the reader.” Abigail Shinn, “The Senses and the SeventeenthCentury English Conversion Narrative” in Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Robin Macdonald, Emilie Murphy, and Elizabeth Swann (Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge Press), 1. This mindset in which all relations or sessions of trial are assumed to be written means that much scholarly attention is also paid to imagining a system in which ministers wrote and edited the relations, stifling and controlling the voices of the faithful, which I will explore more fully in Chap. 5. Finally, it also leads scholars to refer to relations as “performances”; see Meredith Styer, “The Pen of Puritan Womanhood: Anne Bradstreet’s Personal Poetry as Catechism on Godly Womanhood,” Rhetoric Review 36:1, 16–18. 53. Bremer, Lay Empowerment, 83–84. 54. Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 85. There is no primary evidence that any candidates in Shepard’s church stood silently as the minister read their relation for them, so we may assume for now that they were always delivered by the candidate. In Fiske’s church in Wenham at about the same time, Fiske sometimes notes that a relation was read for someone, but does not make it clear whether the person stood there and listened as it was read out. “23 of 1st 60 - On this day the relation of Brother Farwel and his wife and Sister Hincksman read and their assent given and Brother Hincksman made his relation viva voce. And the church after (none objected), upon their approbation of the same by virtue of the persons for … observance and their desires and their assent to the said profession of … voted the receiving into our covenant. And so they were.” “Volume 47: The Notebook of the Reverend John Fiske,” 51.

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55. “Hooker … placed [an] aggressive eroticism at the center of an otherwise sober picture of self-control. … [In] a passage from The Unbelievers Preparation for Christ [Hooker says] ‘you should daily be persuading of your soules [to] bid him welcome.’” Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 44. Hooker did not develop this idea as Shepard did, falling back frequently on descriptions of the believer passively making themselves available to receive Christ. 56. This separateness of women’s spiritual identities can obscure their power. See Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-­ Century New England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980) for the usual focus on public, political power that obviates the all-important puritan spiritual realm. The overwhelming majority of puritan women in New England did not bring the empowerment of their spiritual identity out of that realm and into the public, political realm. Unlike the “visionary women” of English puritanism, whose political speech and public activism “inspired a mixture of awe and terror among males during the 1640s and 1650s,” New England puritan women reserved their independence to the spiritual realm, where the “effusive, powerful, and emotive outpourings of the spirit were not merely tolerated but in fact highly prized.” See David R. Como, “Women, Prophecy, and Authority,” 205, 207, 219 for differences and parallels between English and New English puritan women’s public and private spiritual identities. Juster describes this as “authority for women experienced as personal rather than abstract power.” Susan Juster, “In a Different Voice,” 39. 57. Margaret Manchester’s exploration of the Verin family and the political disorder sown by Jane Verin’s actions to move her spiritual independence into the political realm reveals the exception that proves the rule that all but a fraction of puritan women in early New England felt a “strongly confident sense of individual self-working in cooperation with god’s purposes” strictly within the context of their own spiritual seeking and activity, public and private. Margaret Manchester, “‘Much Afflicted with Conscience’: The Verins and the Puritan Order,” Journal of Family History 2017 42, No. 3, 214, 217. 58. What Susan Juster says of later evangelical women in America is true of these puritan women: “The restoration of agency is the key to understanding women’s experience of grace.” Susan Juster, “In a Different Voice,” 53. 59. Primarily through the digital publications of New England’s Hidden Histories http://www.congregationallibrary.org/nehh/main

CHAPTER 2

Close-Reading the Shepard Manuscripts

I read the Selement and Woolley transcriptions of the 1638–1645 Cambridge records for years before I ever looked at the actual manuscript pages, in a Shepard notebook at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. What I found was a revelation.1

Elizabeth Olbon (Goodman Luxford’s Wife) Selement and Woolley Transcription …And then she saw no unclean thing should enter into heaven, yet she saw she must come to a naked Christ and that she found the hardest thing in the world to do. Yet by this Scripture out of Isaiah and Matthew He let her feel His love. Since she came hither she hath found her heart more dead and dull etc. and, being in much sickness when she first came into the land, she saw how vain a thing it was to put confidence in any creature. But yet it wrought some discontent in her own spirit but that since witnessed the Lord’s love to her. Sometime a heart to run and sometime to sit still in the Lord’s way. Original Shepard Manuscript …& yn shee saw no unclean th should enter into heaven; yet shee saw shee must come to a naked Xt & yt shee found the hardest th. in the woorld to doe; yet by this Scripture out of Isay + mat. he let her feele his love,////// Then wn the Ld gave her some comf; & hopes

© The Author(s) 2020 L. Rogers-Stokes, Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–1649, Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50845-6_2

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of mercy///////—— Since shee came hither shee hath found her hart more dead & dull &c & beinge in mc sickness wn shee come first into the land shee saw how vain a thing it was to put confidence in any creature; but yet it wrought some discontent in her own Spirit;//// but hath since witnessed the Lds love to her; //S/o/m/etimes a hart to run & sometime to sit still in the Lords way

The differences apparent here are not reserved to the transcription’s modernization of spellings and usage, or the creation of regular sentences that begin with capital letters. In the original manuscript, Shepard used a clear paragraph break to show where Elizabeth Olbon started afresh after a false stop that Shepard crossed out (“then when the Lord gave her some comfort and hopes of mercy”). He noted another pause or stopping place in the narrative after “discontent in her own Spirit” by making a series of slash marks (////). But then an update was added—“but hath since witnessed the Lds love to her”—and Shepard demarcated this new conclusion with another series of slashes. The session continued, however, so Shepard wrote over those slashes to add one final note from Elizabeth (the word “Sometimes” is written over the /////, overriding them). Selement and Woolley state in their Introduction that their “paragraphing follows Shepard’s although often an editorial judgment has had to be made in order to determine whether several slash marks were Shepard’s period or paragraph indicator; in such cases determinations were made on the basis of this context.”2 But as shown above, and as I will demonstrate below, it seems clear in the original manuscript that multiple slash marks did indicate paragraphs and were often used along with extra spacing between lines on the page to show this. Despite this, Selement and Woolley’s pages are unrelieved blocks of text with virtually no paragraphing whatsoever.3 Their conviction that they were looking at records of live relations may have overwhelmed their editorial judgment: Shepard would not have had time to create paragraphs during the rush of a live relation, and so their transcription would not include any—even when they are obvious in the manuscript. Selement and Woolley also make clear that they omit “crossed out words, phrases, or passages,” but do not say why this valuable information should be elided (including them as struck-through text is standard

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practice in historical transcription now).4 Even more problematically, sometimes they include words that were struck out: in Goodwife Holmes’ narrative, Shepard writes “but Lord followed me but with sore afflictions”; Selement and Woolley include the struck-through “but” to write “but Lord followed me but with sore afflictions.” We see that this small change makes a big difference in meaning: in the original, Holmes says that God sent her sore afflictions; in the transcription, Holmes says that God was present to her, but also sent her afflictions. In the original, the meaning is that God not unexpectedly beset her with problems, most likely to humble her. In the transcription, the afflictions are an unexpected blow from a God that had seemed close to her. Superscripted words are moved in-line and bracketed, which makes their time-bound interpolation less visible. Selement and Woolley also make a few errors in their transcription, as in George Willows’ narration where they say “the Lord drew his love” when the manuscript says “the Lord drew his heart,” or when John Sill mentions the “holiness of god” and the transcription says “holiness of Xt [Christ].” One place where a mistake utterly confounds meaning is in Brother Winship’s wife’s narration, where she asks “will lord loose glory by me that have been so vile” but the transcription says “will lowered lose glory by me that have been so vile.” A daring question about whether Christ debases himself by offering free grace to sinful humans is thus transformed into a confusing question for the reader about what is “lowered.” The transcription published by Selement and Woolley is a gift to all who study early America, and all the more amazing considering the herculean effort it must have required of them to read Shepard’s often difficult, often tiny handwriting with their naked eyes or primitive magnification. My fine-tooth combing of the manuscripts was made much easier by working with digital images that could be infinitely zoomed-in to enlarge the writing. Therefore, when I ask why Selement and Woolley made the editorial choice to strip the manuscript pages of their formatting—their punctuation, paragraphs, superscripts, and strike-throughs—I have no intention of denigrating their commitment to making Shepard’s records available to a wide audience. One-to-one transcription is a relatively recent scholarly norm, and certainly in the early 1980s when Selement and Woolley were producing this transcription the norm was to modernize spellings and usage. Indeed there is often no added benefit in preserving archaic spellings or typography in a seventeenth-century manuscript when they don’t impact meaning. But the punctuation and paragraphing, and

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the words originally added or deleted by Shepard, do impact meaning, and are thus important to preserve.5 Let’s look at part of George Willdoes’ [Willows] narrative, which follows Elizabeth Olbon’s. It is just one page long, and written extremely neatly and with long tails. It has only one paragraph break, near the end, which also marks the first appearance of slashes: …Yet his he had no power to lay hold upon me; unles the Ld did draw his hartto himselfe;// since this the Ld hath revealed himself & drawn himselfe, to him by his ordinances;///// Since I came hither yt hath bin my greafe yt I walk no more closely wt god in the place where I came;///////// The Ld revealed Xt unto me by revealing the fulnes of his riches of grace & helpe in Xt://

The slash, or virgula suspensiva, was the equivalent of the period in seventeenth-century English: periods themselves were rare, as the semi-­colon was used far more often, and is what Shepard used most often to end a sentence (he occasionally used the colon). Two kinds of slashes were often inserted after the fact into a written manuscript: …the virgula suspensiva to indicate a medial pause (especially a minor one) and the punctus, a final one. …The virgula suspensiva, therefore, indicated not only commata but also places where the sense or rhythm would allow a slight hesitation in the course of delivery to assist in clarifying the sense and prevent monotony, so long as the flow of the period was not broken. I propose to call these groups “declamatory” units.6

In Shepard’s manuscript, the virgula suspensiva (hereafter referred to as the slash, for simplicity’s sake) seems to fulfill the purpose of representing both medial and final pauses. There is frequent use of two slashes standing before a new sentence (a medial pause), and also frequent use of multiple slashes—anywhere from 4 to 20—representing success or failure in a narrative (a final pause). If we picture someone coming to see Shepard intending to relate their spiritual experience for the first time, we can imagine that they practiced telling their story of seeking at home many times beforehand. After that

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first meeting, they would return home to continue their preparation, making an effort to advance it. As they progressed through further sessions of trial, the first part of their narrative would become relatively strong, and readily given. It represented completed work. The fact that most of the records in Shepard’s notebook begin with a fairly long passage uninterrupted by any slashes or paragraphs illustrates this. Then, the stream of narrative would dry up as it entered territory that was still in flux, still being worked over and figured out. Perhaps the applicant was self-conscious or self-doubting when it came to describing that all-important moment of assurance; perhaps they had gone to see the minister because they had hit a rocky point in an otherwise strong spiritual and were struggling with a loss of confidence and direction; or perhaps they were rolling along when Shepard stopped them with a question that made them less confident. I will discuss the latter option at length below. For now, the fact that many narratives in the notebook begin strong, then at the mid- or end-point become a string of separate statements, questions, or thoughts separated by multiple slashes seems to confirm the hypothesis that Shepard used that punctuation to show pauses of different lengths, “declamatory units,” and sometimes altogether new sessions of trial.7 For instance, when George Willows ended a thought or a session of trial on a hopeful note, Shepard noted that positive conclusion with a semi-colon and five slashes. Then George continued, or returned for another session, and described being beset by severe doubt—he felt grief that he had been unable to profit spiritually by moving to godly New England: “Since I came hither yt hath bin my greafe yt I walk no more closely wt god in the place where I came;/////////.” This realization substantially derailed his progress; he stopped his narrative for some amount of time, whether a few moments or a few days or weeks, and nine slashes were used to show just how full a stop this was. The next thought after this full stop of slashes represented the fruits of the session in which George expressed his doubt—God has revealed himself more fully, and George now feels entitled to “the fulnes of his riches of grace & helpe in Xt://.” Whether this revelation came at the end of the session, or in an interim period after that session, it’s clear that George Willows went through a full cycle of feeling close to, then distant from, then once again closer to God. Likewise, Barbary Cutter ended her session with a statement that some of her doubts had been resolved (“answered”), and Shepard noted this conclusion with a semi-colon and eight slashes:

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& so answ doubts from Xt I saw; ////////

But then the conversation continued, causing Shepard to write over the last three slashes: & so answ doubts from Xt I saw; ///// s/o/m/e wt more;

Writing “somewhat” over those last three slashes adds a granular, “you are there” time stamp to the continuation of the session: Shepard pressed her, and Barbary resolved “somewhat more” of her doubt. Gaining steam, the session continued: & so answ doubts from Xt I saw; ///// s/o/m/e wt more; & this day in forenoon

“This day,” this very morning (“forenoon”), Barbary Cutter found assurance, and so Shepard went back to make one final insertion to represent this breakthrough: he added the word “all” before “doubts”: & so answ ^all doubts from Xt I saw; ///// s/o/m/e wt more; & this day in forenoon

The transcription elides all of this exciting, in-the-moment progress by presenting one bland sentence: “And so answered all doubts from Christ I saw; somewhat more: and this day in forenoon.”8 Slashes and spacing on the page to show paragraphs throw abundant new light on the narrative of Brother Crackbone’s wife (first name unknown)9: Her brother sending for her to London; in a good house yr I considered my course & ways esply of one Sin & thoght the Ld would never accept me more; & was terrified & out of hope. & hearing 1 Isay. White as snow I had some hope:

Mrs. Crackbone began, as most applicants did, with her early life. Living in a godly household, she became aware of her sinfulness and entered the first stage of preparation: fear and hopelessness in the face of her own

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sinfulness. A paragraph-space transition marks a step of progress after this, as she used the means of Bible reading, hearing a sermon, or both, and this brought her hope that her sin-blackened soul could be washed white as snow by Christ’s grace: & hearing out of mr Smiths book wt Ld required viz. the hart:; & if hart was given yn eye & foot was given;////

Another paragraph space represents another clear moment in her spiritual progress, where after hearing a reading from a godly book, she realized that if her heart really belonged to God her whole person would belong to him—that is, she would be righteous and right-acting in all her earthly actions (of “eye and foot”). At this point, Shepard marked the end of phase one of the narrative with a semi-colon and four slashes. Since he usually used a semi-colon and one slash for a “period,” we see that this is more than a brief pause in a continued narrative. This is made even more clear by the next statement to follow the four slashes: & so I wisht my parents knew mee;//

So far, Mrs. Crackbone’s story has been positive and successful. But it is followed by this mournful statement. This is a sad reflection on the consequences of Mrs. Crackbone’s commitment to a puritan way that her parents did not embrace—hence, it is her brother, rather than her parents, who sends her to a “godly” house in the first line of her narrative. She must have had some difficult encounter or conversation with her parents about her religion that she recalled while talking with Shepard. What happened in the span of time between her first statement and this sad comment, a span represented by the four slashes? How did this memory come up to derail her narrative? We do not know what question Shepard may have asked, or what stray comment Mrs. Crackbone may have made that he followed up on, or how the sudden, unaccountable memory may have come to her out of the blue at that moment. She may have been reflecting on her own happiness at her early progress and then suddenly recalled her parents’ disapproval—something she wanted to forget and had not intended to include in her relation. Perhaps when the memory came unbidden, Mrs. Crackbone stopped speaking; perhaps tears came to her eyes, or she asked to stop for a moment. Whatever the reason, the memory of a gulf opening up between Mrs. Crackbone and her parents brings her

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narrative to another full stop, as represented by the combination of two slashes and another paragraph break. Perhaps Shepard waited quietly for her to speak, or perhaps he drew from her what the problem was. Once it was stated, another, but shorter, pause for conversation and counsel took place before Mrs. Crackbone continued on by relating more troubles: & so being marryd & having poor means; & having afflictions on my child & took frm me & so troubled wt became of my child & to hell I thoght it was bec: I had not prayed for ym, + so came to N:E: I forgot the Ld as the Israelites did; & wn I had a new house yet I thoght I had no new hart & meanes did not pfit me;/ & so doubted of all Ld had done; yet hearing wn Ld will do good he takes away all ornaments;

No access to godly instruction (she had only “poor means”) after her marriage, a child stricken by illness and taken by death; horrible self-blame as the bereft mother wondered if her inability to pray meant that her child was now in hell. This litany of failure, following such a strong start, opens up the possibility that while Mrs. Crackbone was relating her early successes, the coming death of her child and the terrible doubt it created were looming in her mind, and thinking of her failure as a mother led her to think of the gulf between herself and her own mother—she wished her parents knew her, as she wished her child could have known that its mother was truly godly and was able to protect it and intercede with God on its behalf. It’s at this point in her narrative that Mrs. Crackbone described her remove to New England, hoping, as so many did, that it would give her spiritual seeking new life and success, but, as for so many others, this remedy seemed to fail. She had a new house but not a new heart, she could not get benefit from means, and doubted that God was really with her: & so thoght of seeking after the ordinances, but I knew not whether I was fit.: yet heard, I was under winges of Xt on[e] of them yet not under both;/ & so saw sloth & sluggishness

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So I prayed to the Ld to make me fit for church felowshipp & Ld:/

While doubting whether she even deserved to use means, Mrs. Crackbone heard a Bible verse that inspired her—she was under one of Christ’s wings, and therefore not abandoned by God, and she needed only to overcome her own “sloth & sluggishness” to get under both wings. This hopeful resolution to do all she could is then followed by a paragraph space and her resolution to use the means of prayer to help make her fit for grace: & the more I prayed the more tempt: I had so I what on[e] in p gave up; & I was afrayd to sing bec to sing a ly; Ld teach me & Ile follow the[e] & heard Lord will breake the will of his last woorke;

Another paragraph explored the common struggles of the faithful to avoid offending God—in this case, Mrs. Crackbone was afraid to sing in church in case it insulted God to hear a sinner sing his praises (that kind of singing is “a lie”). It also contains the equally common hopefulness of hearing a Bible verse that encourages (God will break her sinful willfulness just before he reveals his grace—“his last work”). There are no extra slashes after these natural transitions in the narrative, and so they seem to have been delivered without pause or break. After the difficult memories of her parents and her bereavement, and perhaps some counsel with the minister, Mrs. Crackbone was able to resume her narrative fairly confidently, perhaps in a later session of trial: & seeing house burnt down I thoght it was just, & mercy to Save life of the child: & yt I saw not after again my children there;/   & as my Sp. was fiery so to burne all I had; & h: prayed Ld would send fire of word, baptize me wt fire & since the Ld hath set my hart at liberty;/////////////////

The final paragraph begins by describing the burning down of that new house that had brought no happiness to Mrs. Crackbone, who had hoped that a new heart would come with her new house in New England. She seems to recount that one of her children was rescued from the fire. Notice that for the first time Shepard’s language is compacted enough to be

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unclear; as Mrs. Crackbone came to a conclusion in this last trial session, she may have been speaking faster, or Shepard may have included only key words that would make sense to him and trigger his memory of Mrs. Crackbone’s full statement when he returned to the record later. A child had been saved in New England to counter-balance the child lost in Old England, and this thought was hopeful. Mrs. Crackbone capitalized on this positive sign to say it inspired her to pray to God to “baptize me with fire”—that is, she was at last willing to give up all she had, all her reliance on her own efforts to make spiritual progress, and let God do with her what he will. Having reached this point, Mrs. Crackbone felt the wonderful release of a heart at liberty—at last she had the new heart she wanted, now that the new house (representing her earthly efforts) was gone. Shepard inserted seventeen slashes after this statement. This extraordinary number shows that Mrs. Crackbone clearly ended her speech, and perhaps her session(s) of trial, at this point. She was still lacking the final action of reaching out for Christ, and perhaps Shepard told her that.10 Once Mrs. Crackbone believed she had indeed taken this final leap of faith, she would have given her successful relation before the church, building on the narrative she had created in trial with Shepard. Along with the slashes, another typographical feature appears in this narrative that is characteristic of many others: the use of “&” to start new lines on the page.11 Figure 2.1 is the first page of her narrative. The repeated symbol “C”—which we now represent with “&”—stands for “and.” Notice that nine lines on this notebook page begin with “C” (referred to here as “and” or “&” going forward). Six of the nine are clustered together, as we see in Fig. 2.2. This cluster corresponds to the section that reads: & hearing 1 Isay. White as snow I had some hope: & hearing out of mr Smiths book wt Ld required viz. the hart:; & if hart was given yn eye & foot was given;//// & so I wisht my parents knew mee;// & so being marryd & having poor means; & having afflictions on my child & took frm me

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Fig. 2.1  Mrs. Crackbone’s narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors— New England Historic Genealogical Society”)

& so troubled wt became of my child & to hell I thoght it was bec: I had not prayed for ym,

All but one of these “&” symbols (the one before “foot was given”) coming at the start of a line represents a new “paragraph” or thought. One “&” was added at the end of a sentence, showing that Mrs. Crackbone went back after the fact, in conversation with Shepard, to link her access to only poor means with the affliction that came upon her child. There is no white space on the page between lines to show paragraphing; instead we see it in the fact that the line above the “&” ends before the right margin. Notice how large the “&” sign is in most of the lines it starts. This emphasis on “&” as a thought seems to mirror the applicant’s natural train of thought in this setting: as each memory comes to her, Mrs. Crackbone began with

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Fig. 2.2  Close-up of the Crackbone narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)

“and”: “and I heard Isaiah 1, and I heard something from Mr. Smith’s book, and I wished my parents knew me, and I was married and lost my child, and I was troubled.” The word “then” is implied throughout—and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. It has the natural cadence of story-telling.12 The final “&” in the manuscript is here in Fig. 2.3, at the end of the second-to-last line, above the final slashes. This “&” sinks below the line it’s on, and has a very long tail. The emphasis and the positioning suggest two possibilities: first that there was a slight pause before Mrs. Crackbone concluded and next that Shepard wanted to signal Mrs. Crackbone’s final transition—“and since [then] the Lord hath set my heart at liberty.”13 To conclude this section, it is clear that the punctuation, the paragraphing, and the use of “&” all make much more sense of what people are saying. The long, unbroken narrative in Selement and Woolley obscures the stops and starts, the movement from one step in preparation to the next, the end of the applicant’s speech and the long pauses in which they talked with Shepard before starting up again, or went home altogether to

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Fig. 2.3  Conclusion of the Crackbone narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)

come back another day. Erasing all this creates the very monotony Parkes speaks of in a manuscript, as the applicant in the transcription drones on and on in one undifferentiated mass of often contradictory episodes, feelings, and comments. We transition now from punctuation and paragraphing to misreadings and, even more crucially, superscripts and strike-throughs not represented, or misrepresented, in the transcription. The manuscript page with Elizabeth Olbon’s narrative begins with a struck-through header for George Willows that reads “George Willowes for Satisfaction/Confession.” The word “satisfaction” is shocking; it is not present anywhere else in the notebook’s narratives and was not language used to describe a conversion narrative or relation of faith. “Satisfaction” was strictly related to someone appearing before the church and acknowledging their specific sins or wrong actions and successfully asking for forgiveness (a process called “making satisfaction to the church”). Why did Shepard use this word, then, and couple it with the far more common “confession”? The question is worth answering; removing this strike-through from the published transcription prevents us from expanding our scholarly understanding. Selement and Woolley transcribe the opening of John Stansby’s record as “‘Tis a mercy I have long begged and waited for and then I bless God for this. I know I came into the world a child of hell.”14 But the manuscript page (Fig. 2.4) shows that that first sentence is actually a separate introduction or exhortation from John before his narrative begins.

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Fig. 2.4  Start of John Stansby’s narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)

Seeing this preface from John Stansby is very moving, and again a “you are there” glimpse into the beginning of his trial session with Shepard. Shepard’s notebook contains the beginning of two narratives that he then crossed out and followed with someone else’s narrative. The first (Fig. 2.5) is on the page where Christopher Cane’s narrative is found.15 There is no other name on the page—no crossed-out name to go with the crossed-out narrative—and so we must entertain the idea that both pieces are from Christopher Cane.16 The narrative is very short17—almost exactly the length of the redaction—and ends without assurance. Did Christopher come in with a narrative that he then utterly scrapped, which Shepard redacted? Did he begin anew in a second session? In the end, we are left with more questions than answers, but this itself is fertile ground for research and investigation. Until now, we had no information on Christopher before he came to New England: the Great Migration record for him states that his origin is unknown, partly because of “his brief and biographically uninformative conversion narrative.”18 But can it be that we do have a partial origin for Christopher, in his redacted record, showing him in London before he went to New England? If the crossed-out narrative in Shepard’s notebook is Christopher’s, then we know he heard the preaching of a Mr. Simpson in London, and must have lived in town or nearby. It is beyond the scope of the current study to pursue this, but it would be fruitful to do so. The decision to not only leave out the redaction but not to mention it at all in the transcription robs us of that opportunity.

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Fig. 2.5  Christopher Cane’s narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors— New England Historic Genealogical Society”)

A second, very exciting redaction comes later in the notebook, as shown here in Fig. 2.6. The original heading reads “Brother Angier his wife;/ child of Dr Ames;////.” Ruth Ames, daughter of the revered puritan theologian William Ames, was born in 1615 in Leyden and married Edmund Angier ca. 1637 in New England. It seems clear from this page that she sat down with Thomas Shepard shortly thereafter. This narrative begins very well19 but ends abruptly, in mid-flow, with no series of final slashes, and without ceremony Shepard crossed out her name and inserted that of Brother Collins’ wife (Martha Collins) and began Martha’s narrative below Ruth’s. We know that Ruth Ames Angier—“the Daughter of that famous Light Dr

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Fig. 2.6  Ruth Ames’ struck-through narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)

Ames” as Jonathan Mitchell described her20—did eventually become a member of the church. Again, we are left with questions and no answers, and again Selement and Woolley’s decision to omit Ames’ narrative withholds valuable grist for research. The narrative of Goodman Daniell (Robert Daniel) is an example of a narrative with Q&A. His actual narrative is brief and adequately represented by the transcription.21 When we look at the manuscript page (Fig. 2.7), we see a clear break after this narrative, where Shepard speaks directly to note a transition to questions from the assembled group: “This generally:/ ptic: Q asked thus he answered.” Questions and answers then follow in a fairly orderly progression overall, but the handwriting (as shown in Fig. 2.8) shows two crucial stops and one place where information was later inserted. Robert’s answer to the first question, “how did the Lord bring you out of that state of security,” flowed readily and concluded decisively with

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Fig. 2.7  Q&A in Goodman Daniell’s narrative. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)

eleven slashes after “though I have seen more of my own enmity than before.” Yet there is an addendum to this answer—“The wrath of God I apprehended to be the casting of soul from presence of god.” Despite the finality of Robert’s original answer, conversation after it led to this bit of clarification being added: he had mentioned fearing the wrath of God earlier in his answer, and perhaps someone asked him to clarify exactly how he perceived this. Selement and Woolley do not mark this eleven-slash break, and so we miss the counsel that leads us to believe that this is not Q&A from an audience of church members, but Shepard and perhaps a few listeners switching modes to help Robert turn his answers into an eventual narrative.

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Fig. 2.8  Close-up of Q&A. (“Image courtesy of American Ancestors—New England Historic Genealogical Society”)

The next question served this purpose—“How hath the lord brought you out of this estate unto the Lord Jesus”? Robert gave a solid answer that he could roll into a narrative: when I feared the wrath of God, he brought me out of this estate by showing me “how just it was for the Lord to destroy me yet the Lord brought me to rest and rely upon his mercy.” The next question continued this narrative-making: “Did you find it hard to lie down and yield to mercy”? What came next in Robert’s answer was unusual. The text reads “A[nswer] by seeing the equity of it for my own vileness;-/////// ——.” The writing in this answer is very small, as if inserted as superscript between lines at a later point. When we take a step back to look at the page, we see two questions written out in even spacing:

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. Q: did you find it hard to ly down & yeeld to mercy 1 2. Q: how did the Ld draw you to mercy://// — The questions are clearly related. Let’s presume that Shepard wrote both questions out and then wrote the answer to the second question first. The structure of that answer is telling: seeing his love to me;// 2: seeing the freeness of his mercy;//&/wn/ he saw no some likelihood in Xt which yet I would seek tho I did perish//////////

So much is lost when the transcription represents this Q&A as one flowing thought—“Seeing His love to me, 2: seeing the freeness of His mercy. He saw some likelihood in Christ which yet I would seek though I did perish.”22 When we look at the original, we see that the Lord drew Robert to his mercy first by making his offer of love for Robert manifest, then by making the freeness of that offer of love manifest. Robert stopped at that point, but the five slashes showing the stop were then written over by Shepard to show a continuation of the thought—that even when he saw no likelihood of being received by Christ, Robert was determined to see that love. (Selement and Woolley omit “& when” and the struck-­through “no”) Shepard seems to have asked him at that point whether Robert really saw no likelihood of grace at all, and Robert changed his language from “no” to “some”—a common term in these narratives to show the cautious optimism of humility. Once this answer to the question “how did the Lord draw you to mercy” was given, Robert and Shepard may have returned to the first question and filled in the blank space left to answer “did you find it hard to lie down and yield to this mercy?” The questions make more sense reversed in this way, but that active making and re-making of this narrative is invisible in the transcription. The decision to normalize the manuscript pages ends up thwarting a rational and common-sense reading of most the narratives.23 Many of the cognitive challenges of the narratives as found in the published version are a direct result of the failure of that version to show stops and starts, words that were spoken then taken back, and words that were added. The swings from positive to negative that come in one long, uninterrupted, paragraph-­ free page in the transcription begin to seem manic; when seen in their original form, as separate thoughts or sessions, they show the hard, emotional work of trial in a more logical way.

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Turning next to the transcription of later Shepard narratives made by Mary Rhinelander McCarl, we see the same disconnect between transcription and original manuscripts, with the same result and the same negative consequence for the modern reader who does not have access to the manuscript.

Close-Reading the 1648–1649 Manuscripts Mary Rhinelander McCarl published her transcription of another Shepard notebook in 1991. As noted above, this notebook had been misfiled into the papers of the Mather family in the early nineteenth century, where it was labeled as “Memorandum of a minister in Boston or its vicinity 1648. Visits to Criminals, etc.”24 McCarl found the notebook, had the breakthrough insight that it was actually Shepard’s writing, and set about transcribing this invaluable set of narratives. McCarl states at the end of her introduction that her transcription has modern spelling and punctuation, “abbreviations spelled out, superscripts brought down to the line, crossed out material omitted, and interpolated material incorporated into the text.”25 But when I found her original typescript copy of her transcription at the American Antiquarian Society, I discovered this was not the case. McCarl’s original transcription is 1:1, and includes the original spellings, abbreviations, strike-throughs, and some paragraphing. This was very surprising: why was her faithful transcription transformed for journal publication into a non-representative block of text? Errors were introduced over the course of this transformation that degrade McCarl’s original work and mislead the reader. Perhaps the anxiety of influence that Selement and Woolley’s block transcription exerted was so strong that McCarl had no choice but to make her work match theirs. Whatever the reason, the effective loss of her original transcription is a misfortune for all who study early America. The Shepard manuscript McCarl transcribed was very different than the manuscript that Selement and Woolley had encountered. The sixteen narratives in this notebook date from 1648 to 1649. Only three of the narratives clearly claim assurance (nine of the narratives clearly do not succeed in claiming assurance, and four are inconclusive). They fill one small, 32-page notebook—there is no other content alongside them, unlike the notebook containing the first set of records. In another contrast to the earlier records, some include Q&A that seems to have been inserted after one record was finished and another begun on the page; the Q&A crowds

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around a precipitous header. If we keep in mind the idea that these were Shepard’s personal records, for his personal use, this executive decision makes sense. Shepard might have compiled his notes of trial sessions into one final record, then decided to go back to this record to include especially pertinent Q&A from the actual live relations that followed. If the questioning at a relation seemed less powerful, he would not include it as a coda to the person’s record of trial. Whatever the reason, Shepard inserted those questions, and the applicant’s answers, after he had filled his little notebook with narratives. These post-hoc Q&A contrast with the internal questions that were posed to some applicants during conference. It is not clear whether the questions came from Shepard, lay participants, or both. Sometimes Shepard included initials by a question to indicate who had asked it (“C.C.” for Christopher Cane or “E.F.” for elder Edmund Frost). Usually he did not. This could mean that most of the questions came from Shepard himself, and would need no such notation. We can’t get inside Shepard’s head to understand why he might identify some speakers and not others. Internal politics and interpersonal relationships may have influenced his decision to identify some questioners in his personal record; he would have known why it was significant that a particular candidate might have had a question from a particular questioner. The later notebook has almost none of the enormous and weighty pauses that dominate the records in the earlier notebook: none of the narratives in 1648–1649 has more than two slashes, and none have substantial paragraphing that shows multiple sessions or long internal breaks within sessions.26 This might prove a number of hypotheses: that later applicants were more practiced; that they were more confident; or that Shepard chose to remove evidence of struggle or of multiple sessions. A logical conclusion might be that he recorded only their later sessions of trial, when their struggles had been worked through more fully. Unlike the earlier notebook, the notebook containing these later narratives has no title stating that they are the relations of successful petitioners for church membership. There is no introductory writing at all; the book begins with Elizabeth Oakes’ narrative without preamble. This lends weight to the argument I make below in Chap. 4 that Shepard titled the narratives in the earlier notebook in an editorial way: here, he says, are the confessions of people who became members; see how tentative they are—see how even those who feel most ready to make a relation cannot reach for Christ. This, Shepard says, is a symptom of the internal failure of New England. By 1648, his mood had lifted, and narratives from sessions of trial—even

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when the majority of them were unsuccessful in claiming assurance— needed no despairing editorializing. I will return to the question of an organizing principle at the end of this chapter. For now, we can still assume that Shepard wrote these personal records of his sessions of trial with seekers who eventually gave relations. Again, McCarl’s transcription is invaluable for any scholar of early America, but the flawed published version contains more mistakes than Selement and Woolley’s. Where their transcription loses the most meaning through lack of paragraphing and stops, McCarl’s loses meaning through misread or omitted words, some of which occur in her original transcription, but most of which were introduced in the published version. Goodwife Jane Stevenson’s narrative illustrates some of these issues.27 McCarl Transcription …And the Lord brought that scripture, All you that are weary, I will give you rest, and Though sins as crimson yet Lord would make them as wool. And I heard Mr. S[hepard] that Christ would come in flaming fire, etc. and hence desired the Lord that I might know him. …And that place in Scripture, I have chosen you… Original Shepard Manuscript …& the Ld brought yt Script. all you yt are weary I will give you rest; & tho sins as crimson yet Ld would make ym as wool: & I heard ^mr S. that Xt would come in flaminge fire &c. & h. desired the Ld that I might know him. …& that place mr S. I have chosen you…

It’s not clear why McCarl leaves out the very unusual underlining of “him”; even more surprising is her rendering of “mr S” [referring to Shepard] as “in Scripture” in the final line when there are three identically written instances of “mr S” above that are all correctly transcribed, as shown here in Fig. 2.9. This misreading changes the meaning by relocating Jane’s insight from a second hearing of Shepard to a reading of the Bible. When we see that “mr S” is referenced once again just three lines down, we see and understand that Jane drew deep meaning from the minister’s words, in public sermon or private counsel; a meaning lost when the second of these three references is lost in the transcription.

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Fig. 2.9  Close-up of Jane Stevenson’s narrative. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”)

Fig. 2.10  Q&A in Jane Stevenson’s narrative. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”)

Jane concluded this session right after her third mention of Shepard, with her comment that she worried that she did not have the strength to lay down the things she loved (“they who will not lay down father & life, is not worthy”) and that this worry was reinforced by her minister: “& mr S. shewinge how ready we were to content or s. wt things of this life.” This inconclusive ending does not show assurance. In Fig. 2.10 we see John

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Shepard’s heading written directly under Jane’s close, and then to the left of it, Q&A for Jane is crammed in: Askt wt Xt was a Spirit:/ wr at right hand, was all righteous,

In McCarl’s transcription, this appears as “Asked where Christ was a spirit. At right hand was all righteous.” But the positioning of “wt Xt” side-by-side in the manuscript shows the two superscript letters are identical—they are “t”s. For further comparison, “where” is abbreviated in the usual just below this in the second line as “wr”; it is clearly different from the “wt” above. Since “asked what Christ was a Spirit” makes no sense, the “wt” in the first line must be an unusual abbreviation of “whether,” which would read “Asked whether Christ was a Spirit,” which would fit better— that is, a question was asked: whether Christ is a Spirit. But it’s not clear that the next line, “where at right hand, was all righteous,” was the answer to this question. Instead, two phases of questioning may be represented here in the most compressed shorthand. The compression does not allow us to understand how the question asked was a logical follow-up to the end point of Jane’s narrative, where she admitted she was too satisfied with earthly happiness. Whatever passed between her final trial session with Shepard and the question(s) or question and possible answer recorded here, we do not know. Likewise, why this bit of post-trial questioning is included here as an after-thought remains a mystery—for now. In John Shepard’s long narrative, he quoted John 15:16 as “you have not chosen you,” and in the published version an editorial “[sic]” is inserted to note this seeming nonsense. But this is in fact a succinct shorthand of what the verse says: “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you…” The shorthand for “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you” is “you have not chosen you,” and this is meaningful, for it reiterates the minister’s focus on bringing people to realize that Christ gives his gift of grace freely.28 After John Shepard’s narrative comes that of Goodwife Jackson. Isabell Jackson’s narrative is an epic journey through one woman’s spiritual seeking, and it is physically different from all of the other narratives in both the McCarl notebook and the earlier notebook. It is the only narrative in either notebook not written entirely in Shepard’s hand; in fact, it has three

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different scribes. It begins, stops, is given a header on a new page, and then begins again on another new page. Twice it stops and begins on a new page, leaving a full blank page in between. It is fully twelve pages long, and is mostly Q&A. Isabell Jackson, of whom we know almost nothing,29 represented a challenge that took the minister and two elders to meet.30 What happened during Isabell Jackson’s sessions of trial? Her narrative began as usual: Shepard inserted a heading with her name directly under the conclusion of John Shepard’s narrative. Isabell began with a standard introduction to her seeking: In ministry out of Isay hear oh child. I have broght up rebellious child: & I thoght I was [a] rebellious wretch agt god; & so I continued longe; I was in a sad condition longe together, & I heard they yt seeke god shall find him & hearing fatherless find mercy in me,

There is nothing in this narrative so far that suggests anything out of the ordinary, let alone a major crisis. For some reason, however, Shepard’s writing ends here, and a new hand takes over. It is possible that, as McCarl posits, an elder sitting in on the lay conference session took Shepard’s place. But I propose that, like Ellen Greene before her, Isabell Jackson began to give her testimony and then stopped. Unlike Ellen, Isabell’s broken testimony was not taken up and “carried” by her fellow listeners; perhaps she went home, to return another day. Whatever the reason, Shepard’s writing stops here, contrary to McCarl’s claim that “leaves 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, and 10 are in Shepard’s hand.” We do not see Shepard’s writing again until Abram Arrington’s narrative, which begins after the close of Isabell’s. These records were compiled in the last year of Shepard’s life, and it could be that Isabell did not return for trial until Shepard was dead, and so an elder took over her trial sessions. His much more complete record of her session was then sewn into Shepard’s little book, to close the circle. The first sewn-in page (see Fig. 2.11) has only a heading: “Goodwife Jackson’s confession.” The handwriting is clearly not Shepard’s. Here in Fig. 2.12 is how he wrote “Goodwife Jackson.” The next page (see Fig. 2.13) is clearly in a new, third hand. The rest of the narrative is in this third hand, which I believe is that of elder Edmund Frost, who from September 1640 till his death in 1672 was

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Fig. 2.11  Heading for Isabell Jackson’s narrative by unknown writer. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”)

Fig. 2.12  Shepard’s heading for Jackson’s narrative. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”)

Fig. 2.13  Continuation of Jackson’s narrative recorded in a third hand. (AAS “Courtesy American Antiquarian Society”)

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the teaching elder in Shepard’s church. He is referenced by Goodwife Willows in her narrative as someone who provided her counsel, and seems to have asked a question of William Ames, whose narrative has “F:Q:” in the Q&A section. It could, however, be the hand of elder John Champney, as McCarl posits. Unlike the rest of the narratives, in both notebooks, whose writing is very clear and regular and free of blots, Isabell’s is replete with blots and instances of someone writing with a dry pen, then with new ink. It also shows most clearly that her narrative is a record of multiple sessions of counsel. The first full page after the heading repeats what Shepard had written: the quote from Isaiah. The elder crossed out misspellings of “brought” and “affect”—rare instances of a contemporary sense of misspelling.31 Isabell continued with further biblical references, and then hit the first real stumbling block in her narrative: …and by the preaching32 of som godly ministers Instruction she was som what helped holpe, and a god godly mynister preaching out of the wholl profesie of malicah, I thought I did reseave much good although I cannot remember and was but a silly poor Creature as I am still which she sayth is a great trubell to her that she is so bad that hath had so much meanes to mak hir better but is not