"An invigorating contribution to the scholarly literature on Puritan New England--original in perspective, forceful in argument, and graceful in presentation. In Staloff's sophisticated retelling, the emergence to authority in Massachusetts of certain intellectuals (clergymen) and intelligentsia (magistrates) as a 'thinking class' shaped the Puritan stronghold's politics and cultural life until 1686. By reading the sources with an uncommonly keen eye for the nuances of power, Staloff sheds new light on many heretofore slighted aspects of Massachusetts history as well as such old chestnuts as the banishing of Roger Williams, the squelching the Quakers, and the jousting over the Halfway Covenant. [Staloff] also offers perceptive new assessments of the Bay Colony's major personalities, including John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Increase Mather. Old hands at Puritan studies as well as newcomers to the field will profit immensely from this insightful book."--Alden T. Vaughan, Columbia
University
"In all probability, [Staloff's book] will quickly become the one book that everyone will read and assign to get into the mind and culture of Puritan New England."--John M. Murrin, Princeton University
"Darren Staloff's analytical categories of class and power provide the structure for what is both an excellent social history of political conflicts and a useful political history of religious events. His account gives new, provocative twists to old stories like the Hutchinson trial, disputes over the charter, and the Halfway Covenant...Staloff's dramatic and nuanced narrative reveals not only the interplay of class and power but also the considerable influence of personalities and ideas."--illiam and Mary Quarterly
"It offers a genuinely ironical way to understand the New England Puritans' lurch into modernity, a topic of neverending interest to scholars in this field."--
Reviews in American History"Staloff presents a provocative argument. It is a thoughtful, intelligent work, one that considers the Puritan elite as dynamic and self-interested. The book is certain to rekindle interest (if it ever died out) in the intellectual history of the Puritans in New England and show us how we can use innovations from other fields, such as sociology, to refine our thinking about history."--
The New England Quarterly"Darren Staloff's compact, closely reasoned book provides the best account to date of the institutional means by which the values of Protestant Christianity, whether contained in the Calvinist Federal Theology or the biblicism of the primitive churches, grew to power in Massachusetts, became pervasive, and then waned...To Staloff's great credit, one finishes his book convinced that such notoriously slippery yet monolithic terms as 'the intelligentsia' or 'thinking class' were, in the instance of the seventeenth-century Massachusetts, both identifiable and accurate."--
Early American Literature
