ABSTRACT
Bodies are emphasized throughout the Antinomian Controversy and its aftermath, from the notorious “monstrous births” of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer to rampant language of infection and licentiousness to the martyr’s pose of Hutchinson’s statue in front of the Massachusetts State House. A great deal has been written about how Hutchinson’s body is invoked within the bitter polemics arising from the controversy; more still has been written about how female embodiment may have shaped Hutchinson’s participation in the controversy. However, scholars have largely neglected how Hutchinson herself treats bodies-not her body but all bodies-in the testimony of her two trials. For Hutchinson, bodies and the Word are not stable signs that signify God’s will but rather are conduits for the Holy Spirit, witnessing to God’s will functionally. This functionalism is apparent both in her approach to the legal requirements of testimony in her first trial and in her argument for mortalism, i.e. the endurance of undifferentiated Spirit alone at the time of the Resurrection, in her second trial. In claiming an “immediate revelation” and insisting that individual bodies are not resurrected, Hutchinson does not reject bodies but, like Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, emphasizes function over symbolic value in ways that challenge a dualistic relationship between body and soul as well as patriarchal privileges based on the association of women with flesh.
