Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699 - Paperback

by Roger Thompson (Author)

Drawing on an extraordinary wealth of court records from Middlesex County of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay, Sex in Middlesex offers a richly revisionist account of social and moral life in seventeenth-century New England. Social historian Roger Thompson brings to life the forgotten men and women of colonial Massachusetts to challenge some of the most entrenched assumptions about Puritan society. Examining cases of fornication, adultery, breach of promise, premarital pregnancy, and sexual deviance recorded between 1649 and 1699, Thompson argues that the Puritan social system was far less rigid, and the relations between the sexes far less coercively regulated, than the dominant historiographical tradition, shaped by scholars such as Perry Miller and Lawrence Stone, has suggested.

Rather than a community defined by patriarchal tyranny and punitive moral control, Thompson discovers in the Middlesex records a society characterized by a striking degree of tolerance, mutual regard, and practical common sense, animated by a genuinely popular Puritan piety. The goal of the courts was not punishment and exclusion, but confession, reform, and the reintegration of offenders into the community. Structured with methodological rigor and written with narrative verve, Sex in Middlesex is at once a work of quantitative social history and a gallery of vivid individual portraits.

Author Biography

Roger Thompson is Emeritus Professor of American History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, where he taught American colonial history for thirty years. One of the leading British historians of early New England, Thompson has devoted his career to recovering the lives of ordinary men and women in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. His books include Women in Stuart England and America: A Comparative Study (1974), Mobility and Migration: East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629-1640 (2009), Divided We Stand: Watertown, Massachusetts, 1630-1680 (2001), Cambridge Cameos: Stories of Life in Seventeenth-Century New England (2005), and From Deference to Defiance: Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1629-1692 (2012).