Hutchinson, Anne

Hutchinson, Anne (1591–1643), religious dissenter.Born in Alford, England, the daughter of a dissenting Anglican clergyman, Anne married merchant William Hutchinson in 1612. Of their fifteen children, twelve survived infancy.

An admirer of the Puritan minister John Cotton, Hutchinson with her family followed Cotton to Boston in 1634. Soon she began holding religious meetings in her home, expounding Cotton's sermons and adding her interpretations. Her intelligence and skill as a midwife and herbalist assured her an audience. Mirroring the views of Anabaptists and other dissenters, and anticipating Quaker beliefs, Hutchinson rejected the so‐called Covenant of Works, by which a moral life offered evidence of salvation. Instead, she espoused an extreme form of the Covenant of Grace, teaching that God could act directly upon the worst sinner through immediate revelation, and that believers were freed from the moral law of the Old Testament. This doctrine, called Antinomianism, alarmed the colony's leadership, particularly when Hutchinson's meetings attracted merchants and the young governor, Henry Vane. Her teachings were seen as undermining ministerial authority, elevating a woman as the judge of men, and authorizing sinful behavior. A synod of Massachusetts churches condemned eighty‐two of Hutchinson's “errors” in September 1637, and in November she was tried before the General Court, presided over by Governor John Winthrop, who had replaced Vane. John Cotton aided her defense, but when she claimed by divine revelation that God would destroy her persecutors, the Court banished her. Confined that winter awaiting exile, her mental condition deteriorated, and she made extreme claims that further alarmed visiting ministers. In March 1638, after a heresy trial, the clergy excommunicated her.

She moved with her family to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and then, after her husband's death in 1642, to Pelham Bay, Long Island. Here in 1643 she and all but one of her six younger children perished in an Indian attack. Viewed in successive eras as a “disturber of social order,” a champion of religious freedom, and a model of female assertiveness, Hutchinson is perhaps best understood in terms of the specific theological issues of her day and the religious doctrines that she embraced and taught.
See also Colonial Era; Midwifery; New England; Puritanism; Society of Friends.

Bibliography

Francis J. Bremer, ed., Anne Hutchinson, 1981.
Selma R. Williams , Divine Rebel, 1981.

Lyle Koehler