Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts

A comparative study of the Quaker meeting in Salem and the Baptist church in Boston.

Carla Gardina Pestana (Author)

9780521525046, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 March 2004

212 pages
23 x 15.4 x 1.3 cm, 0.32 kg

"...precise, suggestive, and pioneering." Edwin S. Gaustad, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

This book presents the history of two religious sects successfully established in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, where it was illegal to participate in any faith other than the legally established congregationalism of the Puritan founders of the colony. The author examines the Quaker meeting in Salem and the Baptist church in Boston over more than a century. The work opens with the dramatic events surrounding dissenters' efforts to gain a foothold in the colony, and goes on to locate sectarians within their families and communities, and to examine their beliefs and the changing nature of the organizations they founded and their interactions with the larger community and its leaders. The work deals with the religiosity of lay colonists, finding that men and women responded to these sects differently. It also analyzes sociological theories of sectarian evolution, the politics of dissent, and changes in beliefs and practices.

Preface
Abbreviations used in the footnotes
Introduction
Part I. Beginnings: 1. The Quaker movement in northeastern Massachusetts
2. A 'pretended church' in Charlestown and Boston
Part II. Development: 3. Sectarian communities
4. Organizational maturation
5. Leadership
6. Boundaries between sectarians and others
7. The politics of religious dissent
Part III. Culmination: 8. Denomination and sect, 1740–80
Index.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], History of the Americas [HBJK]