Thomas Shepard (1605–1649) was a Puritan minister whose nonconformity led him to immigrate to Massachusetts in 1635. Upon arrival, he became pastor of a new congregational church at Cambridge and busied himself with church and civic matters, as well as Native American missions. He is best known now for his writings, including The Parable of the Ten Virgins, The Sincere Convert, and The Sound Believer.
In Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–1649: Heroic Souls, independent scholar Lori Rogers-Stokes focuses on a lesser-known set of writings comprised of statements that scholars have assumed to be testimonies given before the church as the final step before full membership, otherwise known as relations of faith. Rogers-Stokes argues that what Shepard recorded are not relations of faith but “records of trial”—that is, testimonies of prospective members privately delivered to small groups at an earlier stage in the process.
In 1981, George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley published the transcripts of fifty-one testimonies from Shepard’s church. Another sixteen were published ten years later by Mary R. McCarl. Both publications presented them as relations of faith. Unable to make sense of Shepard’s compressed notes and the lack of assurance in the confessions, scholars continued to envision “a miserable people unable to understand or accurately identify or express their deepest emotions, a people controlled by their powerful minister, and in particular, miserably oppressed and inarticulate women” (p. 5).
On close investigation, Rogers-Stokes discovers that the Selement, Woolley, and McCarl transcripts grossly misrepresented Shepard’s manuscripts. Shepard’s writing is neat, orderly, and carefully formatted and punctuated to reveal the nuances of dialogue. Such variation is absent in the transcripts, where large blocks of text conflate speakers and include things Shepard struck out and no one said. Why the discrepancies? Rogers-Stokes presumes the “pressure of the assumption that they were records of relations” is to blame (p. 7). Studying the originals led her to believe that they were records of trial rather than relations of faith. This revised timing better explained Shepard’s compact language and the absence of assurance.
Rogers-Stokes proceeds to show evidence for her view, beginning with side-by-side transcripts: Selement and Woolley versus her own. She includes numerous such comparisons with scores of personally transcribed extracts, plus over a dozen photos. She acknowledges the contributions of Selement, Woolley, and McCarl, noting the common and often helpful practice of modernizing “archaic spellings or typography” (p. 41), but then goes on to illustrate how their edits negatively impacted meaning. Between a “lack of paragraphing and stops” in Selement and Woolley and “misread or omitted words” in McCarl (p. 60), she demonstrates that the trial thesis better explains the evidence.
Shepard considered the last stage of spiritual preparation to be, not passive humiliation (an earlier step), but an impulsive leap into the arms of Christ. In other words, “to discover your assurance, you must reach for it” (p. 86). Rogers-Stokes says this concept was unique among his contemporaries (pp. 81, 82, 88). She gives little to substantiate this view, however. She cites some secondary sources but gives no direct proof for other New England pastors holding a contrary view.
Rogers-Stokes consistently paints Shepard and his view of the spiritual state of New England in dark hues. She outlines “speculative” reasons for what she calls his “dark ruminations” and “unique pessimism” (p. 103): persecution, family loss, and disappointments with fellow pastors and congregants. He was especially troubled by some parishioners’ reluctance to “close with Christ,” which he attributed to unbelief rather than scrupulosity.
Undoubtedly, Shepard was concerned for the people of Cambridge and New England, but at times one wonders about the accuracy of Rogers-Stokes’s negative framing. His anguish is arguably the fruit of love as much as law. For example, she illustrates his “dark vision” with an extract from his public fast day preparation of April 4, 1639: he “blamed himself for his flock’s unbelief,” she says (pp. 116–18). He does so, but the tone of the entry is one of abasement commensurate with public fast-day preparations.
Rogers-Stokes also spotlights the records of women, the “heroic souls” of Cambridge. Their testimonies provide remarkable glimpses into both the trial process and their spiritual journeys. Her summaries and commentary on them are helpful but tend toward editorializing. She is right to assert the importance of these women’s voices, but her emphatic—and admittedly anachronistic—use of the “modern hero” concept to accentuate their value is strained (pp. 138, 159).
In her effort to depict the women as on an “epic quest” and “struggling alone against cosmic forces, ultimately reduced to two players: the seeker and the Lord” (pp. 135, 137, 139), Rogers-Stokes reads out of the silence meanings not obviously there (pp. 136, 144–45, 149) and continually bumps up against the reality that they were not alone (pp. 6, 138, 155–57). The Cambridge women were heroic souls, but not necessarily for the individualistic reasons Rogers-Stokes emphasizes. Yes, they were “determined, passionate, informed, and individualistic” (p. 21), but not just as spiritual seekers. Their significance lay in all aspects of their identity as women integral to families, churches, and communities.
Despite these interpretive quibbles, Records of Trial represents a notable contribution to early New England scholarship. Against the prevailing thesis that Shepard’s notebooks contained relations of faith, Rogers-Stokes argues convincingly that they are better understood as records of trial. Her thesis is novel and well-defended. Her painstaking analysis is continually on display in her cogent writing, thorough research, citations and footnotes, original transcripts, and helpful pictures. Her work provides a fresh reminder of a foundational conviction of the historian: details matter.
