Anne Hutchinson and the Mortalist Heresy

Abstract

IN the mid 16405 Presbyterian champions in the English Puritan Revolution-Thomas Edwards, Ephraim Pagitt, Robert Baillie, and Samuel Rutherford-called alarmed attention to the growth of yet another heretical sect, the SoulSleepers, or mortalists, who rejected belief in a conscious immortality of the soul or asserted that at death men's bodies and souls perish together. The ministers' orthodox outrage was partly a response to the popularity of a recent notorious tract, Mans Mortallitie, by the Leveller Richard Overton, but they all recognized that the heresy was an ancient one which had especially troubled the church since the Reformation. Hymeneus, Phyletus, the Libertines, the Georgians, Henry Nicholas and others appeared in the heresy's history, but Baillie and Rutherford were perceptive enough to include Mistris Hutchison of New England as well.1 In doing so, the Scottish polemicists were more discerning than modern historians of the Antinomian upheaval who have largely ignored Anne's troubled but stubborn defense of the soul's death in her final conflict with the Bay, her ecclesiastical trial in March 1638. This neglect of the American Jezebel's mortalism is somewhat difficult to understand, especially since students of seventeenth-century England have paid such close attention to the idea in Overton, Milton, and Hobbes.2 The explana-

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