Puritan Godly Discipline in Comparative Perspective
Legal Pluralism and the Sources of “Intensity”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9420112 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard J Ross (0009-0008-1068-3147, Chicago Kent College of Law, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 113 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 975-1002 |
| Publication date | 2008-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1086/ahr.113.4.975 |
| OpenAlex | W2050929857 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 4 |
Early Massachusetts (c1630-1660) is famous for the intensity of its drive for moral righteousness and a more fully Christianized society. This essay explores the reasons for this intensity by situating the colony in two frameworks seldom brought together: first, the comparative exploration of post-Reformation campaigns for godly discipline and confession building; and second, the comparative investigation of legal pluralism among New World settlements. A study of early Massachusetts allows consideration in a colonial context of the suggestion, raised by European historians, that there was an inverse relationship between the effectiveness of godly discipline and a polity's degree of social complexity and legal pluralism. Contemporary presbyterian critics of Massachusetts discipline provide a way into the problem. They viewed the New England Way as deficient in the sorts of mechanisms for coordinating among congregations and between the civil and ecclesiastical realms available in Reformed polities such as Calvin's Geneva and early seventeenth-century lowland Scotland, places of special significance in debates between presbyterians and congregationalists. These critics predicted that schism, oscillations between enthusiasm and lethargy, and inconsistent standards of judgment and administration among clashing churches and civil authorities would together undermine Massachusetts discipline. Part of the reason why they were wrong was that Massachusetts displayed low levels of social complexity (relative to European Reformed polities) and a modest degree of legal pluralism (by the standards of other New World settlements). Treating early Massachusetts as a case study within the context of scholarship on post-Reformation godly discipline and New World legal pluralism suggests alterations to these two flourishing literatures and offers ways to connect them. The colony's experiences challenge the trajectory of change assumed by scholars of New World legal pluralism. The historiography on European confession building provides new ways of perceiving family resemblances among settlements in different empires that were pursuing parallel programs of intense godly discipline and Christian education. Evidence from the New World could contribute to debates among scholars of the post-Reformation European confessional age by demonstrating, in a number of colonial settings, how civil and clerical leaders committed to the pursuit of godly discipline benefited from modest levels of legal pluralism
Legal pluralism · Legal profession · Legal realism · Pluralism (philosophy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Schism · Scholarship · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,14 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2020 (9) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |