ABSTRACT
Four months after her trial before the General Court, Anne Hutchinson was brought before her church in Boston to determine whether she should be excommunicated. It is easy to treat that hearing as a continuation of the earlier trial and many studies do precisely that, ignoring one to focus on the other or collapsing the two together. But the relation between the two was more complex: issues identified in the first trial shaped discussion in the second, but the second had a very different emphasis. There was an important procedural difference as well. While scripture provided the rules for both, at least nominally, final judgment at the trials rested in very different hands. Before the General Court, the colonial government presented the case against Hutchinson and then the assistants and deputies entered a ruling. As Hutchinson persisted in questioning whether the doctrine of resurrection could be found in scripture, Wilson again called in for a vote on her errors.
