Roger Williams, Painful Saint

They called Roger Williams a "painful saint" in his happier days in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.   I bet when he heard that he blushed and said, "Aw, fellas, thanks."

For you see, this was a great compliment.

How do you reconstruct a world that has vanished, like that of 17th-century Massachusetts?  Its remnants are a little art (Non-Conformists were never big on art), some relics of their material culture (their pans and their hinges and a few lucky textiles), and thousands and thousands of words.  English words, and we know English.  We figure we can read what they wrote and by that path find our way into their world.

But language is an ebullient thing, a living thing, bursting its bounds and changing course as its speakers choose.  Definitions change.  The slight nuances of meaning that the speakers took for granted have to be teased out of their context by readers in this day.  We will never know how successful at understanding we are, or are not.  The only ones who could tell us are long gone.

But it's not just definitions that change.  Since the world that those words referred to has transformed and transformed again, the things that those words referred to have also changed.  Sure, a horse is still a horse.  But what about a concept like "democracy" in a world that placed no great value on participatory government, and little on individual choice itself?  How do we understand that?  We enshrine individual choice.  We can't get over how awesome it is.  Not being able to choose is "being forced," and "choosing for myself" is equal to finding truth.  (Good luck with understanding all that, future generations.)

The "painful" in "painful saint" does not refer to ouchy-ness.  It is closer to our "taking pains":  to do something well; diligence, attention to detail, keeping to the spirit as well as the letter.

And "saint" is the Protestant understanding of that biblical word:  a sincere, practicing Christian is by definition a saint.  It refers to the inner reality of that person, his soul, which Christ has made perfect even in this life.  The rest of his being, body and mind, is deeply flawed.  So he may make sincere mistakes.  At times he willfully chooses to do wrong.  But the dynamo in each true Christian's core is a perfected soul, and that should be evident in a person's life if it is actually there.

So a "painful saint" is an extra-sincere Christian, one who is extra-diligent in practicing her faith.

Part of the problem with the word "saint" is that in our time it always has a negative connotation on some level if it is used toward a living person.  If we say, "That woman is a saint!" then we mean she must be doing something really good, really worthwhile -- but there is still a lingering meaning that she is doing too much, working too hard, being too understanding -- possibly not being quite real -- possibly showing the rest of us up.

Non-Conformists called fellow believers "saints" the way we say "Christians," and every time I run into that usage in one of their letters or whatever, I recoil inside.  Woo-hoo to you, you're a saint . . . so I am not as far into that world as I could be.

A "painful saint" -- does that seem attractive?  Even now that you know what it means?  Would you want to be trapped on a stranded cruise ship with a painful saint?  A super zealous Christian?  How does a super zealous Christian behave?

What if that Christian was zealous in the Christian values of love and humbleness?  Invisible service, random acts of kindness, Mother Theresa -- that sort of thing?  What if love and kindness marked a painful saint?

Ah, but along with things like strict morality and orthodoxy?  But first, love and kindness?

Roger Williams was a genuine painful saint.  He was a superior character, I think -- an exceptional human being.  His character was shot through with love and kindness, even while he was being doctrinaire and inflexible, even as he let you know how wrong you were.  And if you can't figure how all that fits in one package, you've got it.  You are up against the central dilemma in history, all history.  We probably can't know just how it all fits together.

Oh, we can get a close enough idea, or at least we can put the pieces together in a way that makes sense to us.  People are people, after all; in all centuries, we understand why the lord falls in love with the bar maid.  But sainthood as a matter of course, as a fact in daily life, is another matter.  And for this writer, portraying Williams' painful sainthood is quite a challenge.

Obnoxious (adj.)

Go ahead, Anne, choose the words that
will screw up my big plans.

"I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

Who says my hand a needle better fits . . . "

Wonderful!  Can't you see Anne Bradstreet at her writing table, slyly taking revenge on her nitty neighbors who all think she should be cooking and canning rather than composing poetry?  It's perfect for us, too, four hundred years removed from Anne's world.  It gives us a heady dose of her spirit.  We get a glimpse of the subtle rebellion that is (apparently) simmering away under her staid garb of a magistrate's wife.

Except . . .

Curse you, Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED is a multi-volume dictionary that contains -- not only (purportedly) every word in the language -- but how each word has been used over time.  So if (for instance) one wanted to find out what the word, "obnoxious" meant in the early seventeenth century, this would be one's first stop.  It's a wonderful tool for historical writers.

Except when it screws up my plans.

Definition 1; "Exposed to (actual or possible) harm; subject or liable to injury or evil of any kind."
Definition 1a:  "With to: Liable, subject, exposed, open . . . "

"Formerly the prevailing use," intones the OED, "now less frequent than 6."

Definition #6 (almost a column later) is our more familiar usage of the word:  "object of aversion or dislike; offensive, objectionable, odious . . . " Used as early as 1675, to be sure.  But philologically, a mistake:  a mixing-up of "obnoxious" with "noxious."

So if I bite the bullet and assume she was using the word as it was usually used in her time -- that makes it:
"I am wounded by each carping tongue"
"I am injured by each carping tongue"
"I am left open to criticism by each carping tongue"

Or some such.

Sure, still pretty good, still workable, still spirited but different than what I thought . . . and frankly (since the discovery is still in its first hour), a bummer.

Writing Pains #4

Well, I've been neglecting this blog shockingly, but for good reason:  I've been writing madly, doing little research for a change, learning to write, finding out where the walls are by walking into them, scratching my head, alternating between glory and shame . . . and it takes up time.

My ole buddy Clio, muse of history, whom I'm
keeping locked in a closet most days right now.
Looks like she's behind on her reading list, to
judge from all those books tossed around.  I
can relate.

I've been thinking about the old story of the nine muses lately as I learn about the writing process.  Time was when they said that creativity did not have its source inside of a person.  Rather, it came from the influence of a goddess, a muse.  Which muse you got at your shoulder depended on what kind of creative work you were doing.  If you were writing a song, then Euterpe might be humming to you; if you were creating a dance, Terpsichore might invisibly shadow you, showing you how to combine spirit and motion.  A writer may be listening to one of several muses, depending on the nature of the work.  And it's not just artists; scientists and and even historians get their own muses as well.

I think I see how this idea became popular, for often the creative process has a life of its own.  The writer sits down in front of the same laptop screen as yesterday, and -- magic occurs.  A character walks out of the shadows, fully formed and speaking.  It feels like magic, though surely it is some intersection -- some mere intersection -- between the conscious and subconscious minds.  But it feels like something outside of yourself, that you are recording rather than creating.  Very strange.

Anne Bradstreet's family entitled her work The Tenth Muse, meaning she herself, a new American master of poetry.  I wonder if that seemed ironic to Bradstreet, if it seemed to her that the Inspirer and the Inspired were being confused.  But on that day in 1650, when they yelled, "Surprise!" and laid her published book of poetry in her hands, she was in no position, or, I daresay mood, to complain.

Anne Hutchinson: Too Smart to Get Along?

I was at my kid's school this week for conferences, and as I was sitting in the hallway on my uncomfortable chair, waiting for the conference before mine to end, my attention was drawn to a butcher-paper display across the hall.  The students had apparently been asked to design a utopian societies, and they had made lists of the principles that would govern them.  Along with the predictable elements ("equality for all," "no murder", etc.), one group had put:  "Those who break these rules must leave."

Ha, I thought.  Do that and you'll end up on the wrong side of history.  The Puritans had a vision for the sort of society they wanted to create. We can't call it a utopia because the Puritans were much too realistic to believe in perfection in this world, but it was idealistic:  live out a simple, purified Christianity; to base church and society, as much as possible, on the New Testament.   If you want to live in Massachusetts Bay, that's the program.  If you don't like the program, there are other settlements in the New World that you are welcome to emigrate to.  And if you want to stay here but not be part of the program, and you kick up a fuss  -- "Those who break these rules must leave."

Four hundred years later, we're still not over the fact that Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were kicked out of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

There is much we don't know about Anne Hutchinson.  The only actual words that we have of hers are those quoted by her enemies.  The largest amount we have is her testimony in court, where she stared down John Winthrop and bested him, two theological falls out of three.

I think there's no question that part of the outrage around her was that she was a woman; that a woman was doing the things she was doing.  It's not that women were held to a higher moral standard in this place and time; it was rather the sense, that to sin as much as she did, she had to be very boldfaced about it, and put herself and her views forward aggressively -- and this was a problem in a culture that valued submission in its women.  It was bad enough when a man adopted a view that was deemed heretical and tried to push it on the whole colony, as did Roger Williams.  But it was worse when a woman did, since she was supposed to be submissive and under the leadership of men.  She was supposed to accept male direction.  So if a man in leadership advocates heresy -- that's bad.  But for a woman to do it -- she's not only advocating heresy, she's also stepping out of her submissive role and behaving in a forbidden way by promoting it.  That's double bad.

It is clear she was an intelligent woman who was able to keep her head and defend herself when she was surrounded by her enemies.  She was also a leader in the community; she held midweek meetings in her home to discuss the sermon, and these had a wide following.

So:  did she get in trouble because she was a smart cookie?  And, did she get in trouble for being a female leader?

It was not her intelligence that got her in trouble.  Massachusetts Bay had any number of intelligent, educated women in its ranks.  Let's take the example closest at hand:  my good buddy Anne Bradstreet.  Bradstreet wrote long, complex, scholarly poetry, and did the Male Hierarchy shut her down?  Nope; a group of them conspired behind her back to copy her poems and send them off to England to be published.  That conspiracy included ministers and a former governor.  It's clear from the laudatory verses that they wrote as a preface to her book that they were proud of her, and part of the source of that pride was that she had excelled where few women had.

Seventeenth-century English people (puritan and otherwise) would say that this sort of intelligence in a woman was unusual, as they believed that women's minds in general were weaker than men's.  Quick intelligence might be a special danger to a woman, though, as it might tempt her to pride, or tempt her to step out of her God-given place in life to take on a man's role.  This was one of the charges laid to Hutchinson.

But it was not because she was intelligent that she got in trouble; it was because she set herself up as an arbiter of the spiritual condition of the colony's members.

Next time, we'll take on the issue of the role that the exercise of her leadership skills had in her banishment.

Anne Hutchinson: Our First Miss America

Go, girl!

"Therrrre she iiiiiis, Miss America . . . "

If any woman gained that title, it would be Anne Hutchinson, the woman who was put on trial for heresy, and whose clever and spirited defense of herself (alone, in front of and surrounded by the Puritan male hierarchy) has gone down in the annals of history as a landmark for both freedom of religion and women's rights.  Look at her!  Chin up, straight back, standing up to those who were trying to shut her down!  And ooooh, those looks on the faces of her accusers -- anger, outrage.  And don't you think there's a suggestion of complacency and arrogance too, especially in the posture of the fellow with the cane?  Her accusers are all in shadow, mere sketches; we don't need their names or their stories to understand this picture.  And frankly, the story works better as a story if we don't have their names or their tales.

Still, I've wondered at times . . . can I say this?  I've wondered if Anne Hutchinson was really so much above reproach.  We tend to read her story as the simple tale of a clever defiant woman who was thrown out of Massachusetts Bay because -- she was so clever.  And she was defiant.  And of course, because that cleverness and defiance came in a female package.  We see her as an early feminist, who had the misfortune of being born in a place and time that could not bear a strong, independent spirit in a woman. So out she went.

Well, as usual, there's more to the story than that.  Tell you what, I'll tell a bit of it, and you can decide if we've got the correct read on Mrs. Hutchinson.

Anne Hutchinson was part of a religious movement that has gone down in history with the awkward name of  antinomianism.  Antinomianism was a reaction against the legalistic tendency in Puritanism.  If we were divide religious experience and practice into two parts -- one being righteous living and good works, and the other being deeply felt spiritual feelings and spiritual experience -- then the Puritans were the first and the antinomians were the second.  Not that spirit was absent in Puritanism, or morality absent in antinomianism.  Both had some of both.  But if we think of religion as a spectrum, with good works and lots of rules on one side, and spiritual experience on the other, then Puritans were clumped on one end, and antinomians on the other.

That was the spirit of the times.  A small, energized minority in England felt strongly that religious reform must happen in England, or all would be lost.  But they disagreed with each other.  Puritanism was the largest segment of these reformers, saying that the Church of England was lost in its formality and  pomp, and that England was morally going down the tubes. They advocated a form of Christianity that was simple and rigorous and based on the teachings of the Bible.  As they grew in numbers,  the antinomian movement emerged as a critique of Puritanism.  They advocated a more experiential Christianity, where spiritual experience guided just what was believed.  So we might say that Puritans focused their spiritual life on the mind, and the antinomians, the heart or the feelings.

And shouldn't religious practice have both?  Yes, yes.  But this is 17th-century England -- we don't get both.  This is how the conflict played out in that time and place.

Antinomians rather hid out at times among Puritans, and a fair flock of them came over in the Puritan migration to New England in the 1630s.  (Not just one woman, ahem.)

Anne Hutchinson arrived in Massachusetts in 1633, three years after the first group arrived (which included my good buddy, Anne Bradstreet).  She was following her minister, John Cotton, for whom she had a great deal of respect.  She arrived with eleven or so of her children, and oh, yes, her husband, too.  Mr. Hutchinson doesn't come into the story much . . . a meek and mild man, he must have been.

The new frontier society that they arrived in had yet to adhere, and its survival as a community was not yet certain.  A couple years after Hutchinson arrived, the colony was rocked by conflict when Salem minister Roger Williams accused the Massachusetts churches of being heretic, and said either they had to completely renounce all other English churches -- or else.  He was expelled from the colony in 1636.  (I've blogged on Williams; check those posts out if you want the full story on him.)

That year or the year following, John Cotton (now minister of Boston Church) sparked something of a revival in his preaching on free grace.  "Free grace" means that it isn't following the rules or living a good life that gets you into Heaven; it is the free grace and acceptance of God.  This liberating doctrine is at the heart of Christianity, and everyone in Boston starts feeling better for kneeling before a loving, accepting God rather than a score-keeping God.  So nobody's mad at each other yet.  Given that law and spirit are both part of orthodox Christianity, this sort of back-and-forth in a church's life is common enough.  Sometimes the focus is more on the rules end of things -- sometimes more on the heart-feeling end.

Here's where the antinomians started taking it too far.  They said that living a good life has nothing at all to do with Christianity.  To parody their position so that you get the point -- if you're a serial murderer and drown kittens every day before breakfast, you might still be one of the chosen of God, and if you died right after you murdered someone and drowned their kitten -- you'd go straight to the arms of Jesus.  Lifestyle on earth has NOTHING to do with your spiritual condition or eternal destination.

OK, they didn't actually go quite that far.  When she was on trial, I don't think Hutchinson ever gave a straight answer to the question of, could a person who is evil in his behavior and completely unrepentant actually be saved and be one of the righteous ones of God.  But she (and others) did affirm that you can't tell who is saved by their behavior at all.  Orthodox Christianity teaches that, while good works don't save, you should be able to see evidence of the indwelling spirit in a person by their good life.  The antinomians said nothin' doin'.  Salvation is not evidenced by a good life.

So, O Massachusetts, your ministers may all be reprobate.  You can't tell who's in or who's out by their good lives.  Your governor, too, and your government officials, might all be sons of the Devil.

And this sort of thing mattered in this community.  Massachusetts was founded for the purpose of living out Christianity in community.  But you can't live out Christianity in community if you can't even tell who is truly a Christian.  The antinomian conflict struck at the heart of the Puritan experiment.  Antinomians obliquely claimed that you can't have an experiment in a Christian state since you have no way of knowing who is actually regenerated by God and truly saved.

Except some people can tell who is saved.  Some can discern it spiritually, said Hutchinson.  Certain people can tell.  Hutchinson put herself in that group, as among those who have this special spiritual gift. Aha.

Several trials then went down.  John Cotton went on trial, was acquitted and stayed in the colony.  The governor of the colony, Henry Vane, went on trial, and was expelled.  Hutchinson went on trial, and out she went.  Almost 80 people were expelled from Massachusetts over this affair.

Feeling grateful for the First Amendment?  Me, too.  But let's keep our 17th-century hats on.  No First Amendment; no standards for religious freedom, yet; and a colony founded for a religious purpose, of a given religious stripe.

So was Hutchinson's gender of no matter at all in this whole affair?  No, it mattered; it made her "crime" all the greater.  More on that next time.

John Winthrop, Scoundrel and Cheat

This is a little study on inaccurate history and how it gets going.

Here's what I read this morning:

"Winthrop befriended the younger [Isaac] Johnson (29 years old at his death) in earlier days in England. . .  Winthrop on Isaac Johnson's death put in probate a sum of over £75,000. Isaac's brother Capt. James Johnson, on his arrival in 1635 was denied his title and right to Isaac's property. With the help of Dudley and others Winthrop kept this wealth in probate, and took fees, for over 30 years. Many documents where destroyed in a very mysterious manner. The documents were part of the "doomsday record" kept by the founders of Boston. Winthrop and others accuse Johnson's wife of adultery and placed her on gallows with the rope on neck, only to let her go. Capt. James Johnson's only crime was to allow his wife to have Bible studies in his home with Ann Hutchinson, "a good woman of the Christian faith" who along with the Lady Arbella came from Lincolnshire, England."

Now, the current take on John Winthrop was that he was a man of honor and so forth; he's even been dubbed a "Forgotten Founding Father" by his most recent biographer, Francis Bremer.  So this is rather shocking, to hear that he kept money away from its rightful recipient so the town could profit from probate fees, and that he threatened to kill off the heir's wife (which is I think insinuated above) to boot.  I'd never heard this story before.  Said biographer Bremer does not mention it.

I've spent some four hours this morning trying to track down the source of this story, armed with nothing but my trusty internet connection and whatever books I have on hand here at home.  What I've found is the same, identical, block of text copied and posted far and wide across the internet, especially on genealogy websites.  And by the way, if you're doing genealogy, beware.  Those sites are unbelievably error-ridden.

I think the original internet source of this story is a guide to touring Boston that Mobil put out.  But where they got this information, I still don't know.  A trip to Northwestern University should clear it up.  I hope.

But I'm pretty sure it's a crock.  I've found no other reference to a dispute over Johnson's will, or the probate issue, independent of the above blurb.  I found a Captain James Johnson, but he did not come over in 1635 and it's not clear if he was a relative of Isaac's or not.  If there is a second Capt'n Johnson, I've yet to locate him.  I've found no mention of a trial for adultery for James Johnson's wife Margery, though I have some more hunting to do on that yet.  Likewise, I've found no connection yet between Mistress Johnson and Hutchinson.

Concerning the "doomsday record:" This is cleared up in "Records Relating to the Early History of Boston"( readily available for download), which refers to Boston's "Book of Possessions" as "our Doomsday Book."  To students of English history, the reference is simple enough.  The Doomsday (or Domesday) Book was compiled shortly after William the Conquerer conquered England in 1066.  It is compilation of all property owned in England, and it was for tax purposes.  First the Normans invaded, then they taxed, but they had assess valuation first.  No wonder the English called this assessment, "The Doomsday Book."  (And a wonderful document it is for historians, for it provides a snapshot of 11th century England society and economy.)

So "our doomsday book" means the New England listing of all land held -- who had what, where.  This listing -- the "Book of Possessions" -- is reprinted in The Second Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, also available online.  It was not destroyed.   I'm not sure what documents the author above was referring to that were mysteriously destroyed, and if they were destroyed, what documents he was using for this story.  Capt. Johnson is mentioned in the Book of Possessions, but only as a property owner -- not as a litigant.

Now this took a morning for me to track even this much of it down.  I still don't know where these rather specific numbers came from.  The moral of the story is you can't just buy whatever you read on the internet, and blithely repost.

I'm completely impressed that you're still reading.  As a little reward for your patience, here's a guffaw  for you from a genealogy site.  It's a biography from genie.com of Isaac Johnson:

Born:  1589
Married: 1582 to Arabella Meaner
Died:  1630
Married:  1630 to Arbella Clinton

Another genealogist records his birth year as 1601 but then says on the same page that their child was born in 1575.  Didn't something like that happen on Dr. Who last season?

Writing Pains #3

In making window glass in the 17th century,
you'd get a "bull's eye" in your glass sheets,
which would be used for  your less prominent
windows.  Nicer windows were only slightly wavy.
Thanks to b3tarev3 for this photo.

Yesterday I went to a writers' group in Winnetka, about half an hour away.  The first hour was devoted to a presentation by an author on incorporating memory into stories, and the second a reading of a manuscript from one of the group's members.  And a fine manuscript it was!  I didn't go crawling out vowing to forsake my inferior writing, but it showed me that I have a long way to go yet.  Well, never mind; at least I'm voyaging, and I've not been at this for very long yet.

In the meantime, I'm making sure I've got Stuart England firmly in my own head before I take Anne across the ocean.  To that end I have learned this about nobleman's houses in the early 17th century:

Carpets went on tables as well as floors.  You'd cover the carpet with a tablecloth if the table was to be used for eating.

In the best rooms, walls were paneled.  Ceilings were often painted.

You would share a goblet or cup at a meal with the person you were seated next to.  After you drank, the cup was wiped out with a cloth and your companion drank.

Women as a whole experienced a lessening of status after Queen Elizabeth died.

Window glass is a very difficult subject to find out anything about.

And here's a sampling of questions that I have:

What happens to that fancy carpet on the table if you spill the wine?  I'm dubious about the carpet on the table during mealtimes thing; it sounds to me like an historian somewhere along the line got a little crazy with his conclusions.  Wouldn't you protect your expensive, irreplaceable carpet by removing it during the meal?  How easily would a stemmed goblet balance on all that fabric?  Still, if the tablecloth covering it were a fine wool, or silk, I suppose that would provide more protection than a cotton one.  Still.

If a married man was seated next to a single woman, would they share a cup?  Doesn't sound right.

Who was the head housekeeper?  Was it a chick or a dude?  What were the expected duties of a steward's wife?

How could you have a house without hallways?  Because they didn't; they had common rooms (like a parlor or a dining room), and then you'd enter private rooms directly from there.  The hallway less than a century away, I think, but  in 1630, except for a long "gallery" on one side or on  the back of the house, they didn't exist.  And it is most inconvenient for this writer to visualize what the top of the stairs looked like, and how you'd get to that room under the eaves on the far side of the house.