Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London

This book presents an exploration of the transatlantic character of early-American religious dissent. "Errands Into the Metropolis" offers a dramatic new interpretation of the texts and contexts of early New England literature. Jonathan Beecher Field inverts the familiar paradigm of colonization as an errand into the wilderness to demonstrate, instead, that New England was shaped and reshaped by a series of return trips to a metropolitan London convulsed with political turmoil. Through chapters focusing on John Cotton, Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton, John Clarke, and the Quaker martyrs, Field traces an evolving discourse on the past, present, and future of colonial New England. In accessible and understandable narratives of the New World, these colonial dissidents were able to override the voices of Massachusetts Bay apologists and make their case effectively to Londoners in arguing for colonial autonomy.