Abstract: This book examines the divisions in Massachusetts over the colony's social and religious boundaries and its relationship to the transatlantic world in the period 1638–92. Central actors are leading men who congregated in the Artillery Company of Massachusetts, an organization that attracted a heterogeneous yet prominent membership – a membership whose diversity and cosmopolitanism contrasted with the social and religious ideals of the cultural majority. Focusing on elite men – not marginalized outsiders – who endeavored to stretch the intellectual and social bounds of orthodoxy, the book demonstrates that the dangers posed by the outside world and various sorts of “others” were perceived in very similar terms over the course of the seventeenth century. The tendency to form opposing factions, insisting both on isolation from that world and involvement in its growing diversity, also remained relatively constant, from the antinomian controversy of the 1630s through the witchcraft epidemic of 1692. The old declension model suggested that Massachusetts fell away from its original purity as alien outside forces impinged ever more heavily on its residents. This study argues rather that dueling versions of the good life, which pitted localism against cosmopolitanism and homogeneity against heterogeneity, competed with one another persistently throughout the century and beyond.

Keywords: antinomian controversy, Artillery Company of Massachusetts, cosmopolitanism, declension, localism, orthodoxy, Puritanism