Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); and Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). For discussions of marital imagery in early-modern English literature, see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966); Jonathan Jong-Chu Won, “Communion and Christ: An Exposition and Comparison of the Doctrine of Union and Communion with Christ in Calvin and the English Puritans” (PhD diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 1989); and Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 1.
11. Cotton Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion (Boston, 1692), 64; Mather, A Glorious Espousal (Boston, 1719), 12; Mather, A Union with the Son of God by Faith (Boston, 1692), 13–15; Mather, The Mystical Marriage (Boston, 1728), 6; Joshua Moodey, A Practical Discourse Concerning the Choice Benefit of Communion with God in His House (Boston, 1685), 24–25.
12. Samuel Willard, A Complete Body of Divinity (Boston, 1726), 459, 533, 556; Willard, The High Esteem Which God Hath of the Death of His Saints (Boston, 1683), 15; Willard, Some Brief Sacramental Meditations (Boston, 1711), 4; Cotton Mather, Bethiah (Boston, 1722), 30.
13. I. Mather, Practical Truths, 175; Willard, Complete Body of Divinity, 892; C. Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, ed. Worthington C. Ford, 2 vols. (1911; repr., New York: Ungar, 1957), 1:98 (May 13, 1685), 426 (April 16, 1702), 471 (March 12, 1703), 483 (May 15, 1703).
14. See Richard Godbeer, “Performing Patriarchy: Gendered Roles and Hierarchies in Early Modern England and Seventeenth-Century New England,” in The Worlds of John Winthrop: England and New England, 1588–1649, ed. Francis J. Bremer and Lynn Botelho (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005), 290–333.
15. Male New Englanders’ conception of themselves as brides of Christ would have been facilitated by their pastors’ depiction of the soul as not adopting the sex of the body it inhabited: they characterized the soul sometimes as female and sometimes as sexually indeterminate. This mattered because Christ would marry not men and women but their souls. Elizabeth Reis has argued that a gendered distinction between body and soul allowed Puritan men to think of their souls as feminine while retaining a masculine “sense of themselves.” I would suggest that such a distinction functioned as one component of a broad gender fluidity. See Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, 79–82; and Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 93–120 (quote on 101). Margaret Masson argues that ministers could use “the female role as a typology for the regenerate Christian” without creating “role conflict” for men because New Englanders “had not yet arrived at definitions of sex roles or personality structure that were as fixed or mutually exclusive as those found in the nineteenth century.” Masson, “The Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate: Puritan Preaching, 1690–1730,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (1976): 305, 315; see also Porterfield, Female Piety, 6–7, 156.
16. C. Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, 39, 42.
17. Willard, Complete Body of Divinity, 131, 145; Nehemiah Walter, Unfruitful Hearers Detected and Warned (Boston, 1696), 52; William Adams, The Necessity of the Pouring Out of the Spirit (Boston, 1679), A4; Samuel Danforth, A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA, 1671), 12; John Wise, A Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country (Boston, 1721), 11. John Oxenbridge likened magistrates to “a nursing father” who “bears the sucking child.” Oxenbridge, New England Freemen (Cambridge, MA, 1673), 36–37. For an extended discussion of maternal imagery in Puritan literature, see David Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980).
18. John Cotton, The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England (London, 1645), 4; see also John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed. James Savage, 2 vols. (Boston, 1825–26), 2:281.
19. Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 49. See also Lisa Wilson, Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Knopf, 1982), 3, 38; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 403; and Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 3. Gender flexibility applied only within particular contexts: women who tried to exercise male-identified prerogatives in circumstances that others saw as inappropriate or who challenged the need to conceptualize power in male terms, appropriating authority in their own right as women, became extremely vulnerable. See, for example, “Proceedings of Excommunication against Mistress Ann Hibbens of Boston,” in Remarkable Providences: Readings in Early American History, ed. John Demos (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 262–82.
20. A growing number of early-modern writers challenged this anatomical paradigm, depicting the female organs as distinct and arguing that women’s bodies were perfect in their own right. But during this transitional period, elements of the Galenic model were often combined with newer ideas, so that distinctions between maleness and femaleness remained much less absolute than in later periods. Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 33, 41, 44, 79, 82, 108; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). See also Janet Adelman, “Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model,” in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 23–52; and Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21–23.
21. See Evelyn Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females,” Signs 10 (1984): 27–24; Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1986); Raymond E. Houser, “The ‘Berdache’ and the Illinois Indian Tribe during the Last Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 45–65; Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds., Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998); Qwo-Li Driskell, Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016); and Gregory D. Smithers, “Cherokee ‘Two Spirits’: Gender, Ritual, and Spirituality
