“To go back I would not…” Heroic Souls is now available from Palgrave Macmillan!
Q: Why is it called Heroic Souls?
A: Because it’s the story of the puritan women of early Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony, and their deliberately created, strikingly powerful, confident, and independent spiritual identities that transcended their public lives as political second-class citizens.
Puritan women. They must have been miserable, meek, oppressed people with no positive sense of personal identity or power.
Wrong!
In New England, the vast majority of puritan women did not attempt to overthrow established social and political norms. You won’t find many political rebels. Instead, they poured their energy into utterly transforming their religion, claiming a vital personal power and agency, and a heroic sense of their own spiritual power and importance.
“Serving women, elderly widows, young wives and mothers, daughters of powerful men—all told stories of heroic seeking that feature their independent labor in reading, praying, listening, asking questions, and making meaning in a world narrowed down to just the seeker and her God. Only a handful of the women’s records mention any kind of traditional female identity as wives, mothers, or daughters.
The heroic souls we encounter in these women’s records labor in secret, in jealously guarded, deliberate solitude. They make decisions, they make demands. They consult powerful men and consider their advice, then use or dismiss it as they see fit. They refuse any attempt to be dictated to by their ministers, fathers, elders, or husbands. In these records, the women of Cambridge create multiple identities for themselves, and prioritize their spiritual identity over those of wife and mother and daughter.
Fierce and uncompromising, full of doubt and failings and sin, these individual women are above all important. The heroic soul has all of God’s attention, all of her church’s attention, all of her own attention. She is free to focus on herself. No one but God can tell her what is right or wrong, no one but God controls her destiny, no one but God has her ear. Her right to position herself in direct relation to God is unalienable.”