1st Edition

Debating – and Creating – Authority The Failure of a Constitutional Ideal in Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1649

By Elizabeth Dale Copyright 2001
    174 Pages
    by Routledge

    174 Pages
    by Routledge

    This title was first published in 2001. In the tight frame of its first twenty years, Massachusetts Bay dramatically altered its constitutional order from a theocracy to an oligarchy, led by magistrates who created their own authority and defined the limits on their almost unlimited power. Debating-and Creating-Authority examines this shift in constitutional order at various levels and looks in particular at the efforts to create the theocracy and its subsequent collapse in terms of a fundamental democratical flaw at the centre of the theocratic ideal.

    Contents: Introduction; Imagining a polity; A system at odds with itself; Crises of authority; Failure of authority; Authority and orthodoxy; Reinterpretations; Untethering the beast; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

    Biography

    Elizabeth Dale, Assistant Professor, US Legal History Department of History, University of Florida, Gainsville, Florida, USA

    ’...a useful contribution to the literature on Puritan New England.’ Journal of American History