The Resurrection of Anne Hutchinson

When Anne Hutchinson, the first American religious dissenter and feminist, showed up on Bob Rimmer’s doorstep, he was at first sceptical but soon succumbed to Anne’s earthy charms. This is the story of two weeks in 1985, when a woman who was banished from Massachusetts in 1638 came back to preach her ideas of freedom in love, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Rimmer’s use of the available literature on Anne (from the diaries of the governor who banished her, John Winthrop, and from Anne’s trials) is brilliantly used to evoke seventeenth-century America in a way no history book ever could.