Free American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante Page A

other’s view. This impasse was a microcosm of the state of the state, and in Winthrop’s mind was unacceptable. Impasses such as these could not be let stand. Something or someone had to be removed so that the colony could be at peace.
    As for Hutchinson, the basis for her determined interpretation of Scripture was her exhaustive study over many decades of her 1595 edition of the Geneva Bible. This Bible, whose copious marginal notesgreatly influenced Puritan thinking, was the one used in most Reformed homes. It was named for the Swiss city where most of the translation had been done. It first came to America in 1620 aboard the Mayflower. Published from 1560 until 1644, the Geneva was for nearly a century the most popular English Bible. The King James Version, completed in 1611, would not gain wide acceptance until the 1640s.
    The Geneva, one of the first English translations of the Bible, was also the first to contain both New and Old Testaments with chapter and verse divisions. A 1408 English church decree forbade as heresy any translation of the Bible into the “vulgar English tongue,” but with the split from Rome in 1534 and the spread of Reformation theology, Henry VIII had a new need. The first great English translator, the Oxford-educated priest William Tyndale, read Martin Luther in the 1520s and then finished his translation while in exile in Germany, where he was martyred in 1538. A Reformer, Tyndale believed that all Christians should independently study the New Testament and count it as the final authority in all matters of doctrine and life.
    This was the case in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1637. For both Hutchinson and her judges, there was no more important text than the Bible. Scripture gave them their law, much of their culture, and most of their understanding of human emotions and relationships. They inhabited the New Israel, which was chosen by God, and saw themselves as “the people of God,” like the biblical Jews. In the words of John Cotton, “The same covenant which God made with the national church of Israel and their seed…is the very same (for substance) and none other which the Lord maketh with any Congregational Church and our seed.”
    On a more practical level, the Holy Bible was one of the few texts available to the colonists of New England, who prior to 1660 had no active printing presses and imported little reading matter from London or Holland. A few of the best-educated men here, including the ministers, had libraries of biblical commentaries and works of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and some even wrote poetry, but dramatists and composers did not exist on this continent. The novel, of course, had yet to be invented. Most homes contained fewer than four books, at least one of which was the Bible. According to early Massachusetts probate records, the Bible was present in more than half of the households, and some houses had two or three. In addition, there was often a book ofpsalms, a primer, an almanac, a catechism, or a chapbook—a small book of stories, songs, or rhymes.
    It is not possible to exaggerate the importance of Scripture to this community. Children learned to read, if they did at all, from the Bible. Families studied it together daily, reading it aloud over several months—from Genesis through to Revelation—and then starting again. Many settlers knew much of it by heart and readily applied it to such events as thunderstorms, sudden inexplicable deaths, or the passing of a comet overhead. For most if not all of those present at Anne’s trial, the Good Book occupied hours of thought every day. “The life of the Puritan was in one sense a continuous act of worship,” the historian Patrick Collinson observed, “pursued under an unremitting and lively sense of God’s providential purposes and constantly refreshed by religious activity, personal, domestic and public. [The Puritan was] much in prayer; with it he began and closed the day.” Knowing God through the