Brilliant… Attuned to the insights of recent literary theory, Knight shows how that assertion of an early unity influenced the idiom of later canonical American authors. Her book is both a rigorous work of scholarship and an artful plea for intellectual diversity.
-- Times Literary Supplement
Janice Knight has given us a provocative and elegant book that yields new understandings of Puritanism in old and New England… This is a work of intellectual and literary history of a very high order.
-- Mark Valeri Journal of Religion
Knight offers nuanced and sensitive interpretations of many Puritan texts, teasing out differences of emphasis and sensibility within the widely shared religious culture of early New England. She demonstrates that a broadly consistent Puritan theology could support strikingly different interpretations in the hands of particular preachers and writers.
-- Eric Hinderaker Religious Studies Review
In this pioneering and provocative book, adapted from the author’s Harvard dissertation, Janice Knight offers a most helpful, if controversial, corrective to one of the chief historiographical conclusions regarding American Puritanism of the first-half of the seventeenth century… Orthodoxies in Massachusetts presents an immensely provocative and cogently argued thesis, debunking the older myth of Puritan monolith… Janice Knight has shown the other strand of Puritan orthodoxy, the Sibbesian–Cottonian tradition, and how the articulated resistance of this group before, during, and after the Antinomian controversy can help to contextualize and rectify our reading of early American Puritanism.
-- Paul C.-H. Lim Westminster Theological Journal
Knight’s work is passionately written… Whether or not one has an investment in the ongoing debates about the import of New England Puritanism, Knight reminds us that New Englanders sought passionately to understand better their relationship to the divine and how to make it evident in their social relations. Orthodoxies in Massachusetts demands that we acknowledge the varieties of religious experience this search engendered.
-- Philip F. Gura William and Mary Quarterly
A major work of scholarship, clearly and accessibly written, stunning in its thoroughness, and fully convincing in its major argumentative premises about the multivocal (spiritist and legalist) origins of American Puritanism and the ways by which structures of orthodoxy are polemically constructed. Knight’s reconstruction of two competing parties, the ‘Spiritual Brethren’ and the ‘Intellectual Fathers’…offers a permanent challenge to homogeneous views of Puritanism… Orthodoxies in Massachusetts is a monument of scholarship with great cumulative power and authority.
-- Jay Fliegelman, Stanford University
With sensitivity and analytic power, Janice Knight identifies a submerged voice within Puritanism that is very different from the tradition of Perkins and Ames as expounded by Perry Miller. In doing so, she makes an important contribution to the recent trend in Puritan studies that has brought varieties of pressure to bear on the monolithic version of Puritanism which Miller bequeathed to us. Orthodoxies in Massachusetts is an authentic work of scholarship and imagination.
-- Andrew Delbanco, Columbia University