Wikipedia:Today's featured article/March 22, 2013

Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643) was a Puritan woman, spiritual adviser, and participant in the Antinomian Controversy that shook the fledgling Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Born in England, she was the daughter of Francis Marbury, an Anglican minister and school teacher. As an adult, she became attracted to the preaching of the dynamic minister John Cotton, and followed him to New England after he was forced to emigrate in 1633. There she shared her religious understandings with women she helped as a midwife, and held meetings at her home to review recent sermons and criticise ministers who did not adhere to Cotton's "covenant of grace" theology. Her religious convictions and outspoken demeanour riled many magistrates and Puritan clergy in the Boston area, and her popularity and charisma helped create a theological schism that threatened to destroy the Puritans' religious experiment. She was tried, convicted and banished from the colony in 1637. After moving to what is now The Bronx, then controlled by the Dutch, she was killed in an attack by native Siwanoy in 1643. She has been called the most famous, or infamous, English woman in colonial American history. (Full article...)

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