Book description
A community is defined not only by inclusion but also by exclusion.
Seventeenth-century New England Puritans, themselves exiled from one
society, ruthlessly invoked the law of banishment from another: over
time, hundreds of people were forcibly excluded from this developing
but sparsely settled colony. Nan Goodman suggests that the methods of
banishment rivaled-even overpowered-contractual and constitutional
methods of inclusion as the means of defining people and place. The
law and rhetoric that enacted the exclusion of certain parties, she
contends, had the inverse effect of strengthening the connections and
collective identity of those that remained.
Banished investigates the practices of social exclusion and its
implications through the lens of the period's common law. For Goodman,
common law is a site of negotiation where the concepts of community
and territory are more fluid and elastic than has previously been
assumed for Puritan society. Her legal history brings fresh insight to
well-known as well as more obscure banishment cases, including those
of Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Thomas Morton, the Quakers, and
the Indians banished to Deer Island during King Philip's War. Many of
these cases were driven less by the religious violations that may have
triggered them than by the establishment of rules for membership in a
civil society. Law provided a language for the Puritans to know and
say who they were-and who they were not. Banished reveals the
Puritans' previously neglected investment in the legal rhetoric that
continues to shape our understanding of borders, boundaries, and
social exclusion.
"Banished is a well-conceived and very timely study
that significantly enhances our understanding of law and literature in
seventeenth-century New England. It is smart, engaged, well written,
and needed."-Stephen Carl Arch, Michigan State University
Nan Goodman is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Colorado at Boulder, where she also teaches law. She is author of
Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in
Nineteenth-Century America and coeditor (with Michael P. Kramer) of The
Turn Around Religion in America: Literature, Culture, and the Work of
Sacvan Bercovitch.
