2019/08/27 by Crawford Gribben · 4 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Art #Baptism #Biography #Confession (law) #Confessional #Dissenting opinion #History #Law #Literature #Mainstream #Moravian Church and William Blake #Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies #Orthodoxy #Philosophy #Politics #Protestantism #Reformation and Early Modern Christianity #Religious studies #Scholasticism #Theology
paper · open access · doi:10.1093/res/hgz113
published in The Review of English Studies 71(299), 292-306 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2019/08/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Abstract Lucy Hutchinson’s religious commitments inform her writing across its variety of genres. Critics and historians have tended to identify her as a Baptist, following the rejection of infant baptism that she records in her biography of her husband, John Hutchinson. But the recent publication of her theological writings allows for a more complicated account of her changing religious views. In the Life, Lucy Hutchinson showed how her husband’s theological commitments radicalized after the Restoration. His turn away from Protestant scholasticism towards a more independent engagement with the Bible facilitated his investigation of millennial theory. After his death, Lucy Hutchinson continued this autonomous theological exploration, and moved further from the orthodox mainstream. After the mid-1660s, she prepared a sequence of theological writings that evidence her increasingly eclectic religious style. These documents suggest that she did not resolve some of her most dramatic movements away from Reformed orthodoxy. In these writings, Hutchinson negotiated a critical distance from her husband’s legacy, the Reformed confessional tradition, and the options available in any of the available dissenting congregations.