Legislating the Lord’s Day: Sabbatarianism in Seventeenth-Century New England

Abstract

This essay explores the reception of the biblical Sabbath in early New England. It challenges the revisionist historiography of Puritan Sabbatarianism by identifying a unique emphasis on judicial enforcement through civil law. Despite some elements of continuity between medieval and early modern Sabbatarianism, as evidenced by documents such as the pseudepigraphic “Sunday Letter,” Puritan doctrines of the Sabbath drastically departed from earlier precedent in their conceptualization of its legal dimensions. In the Elizabethan and early Stuart eras, figures such as Thomas Cartwright, Phillip Stubbes, and Nicholas Bownd laid the groundwork for the notion of civil enforcement, even capital punishment, for Sabbath-breaking. Some Puritan colonies implemented these models into their legal system, at times including the death penalty as well. Although they never executed anyone for Sabbath-breaking, the Puritans’ attempt to integrate Sabbatarianism into the civil law, rather than leave it to ecclesiastical courts, violated English norms and contemporary standards of jurisprudence.