This short book focuses on the case of Jane and Joshua Verin, two members of the New England settlement of Providence, who in 1638 came to be the centre of a controversy in their community. Joshua had forbidden his wife from attending church, since he was in dispute with the community's leaders; acting on her own liberty of conscience, Jane defied her husband – and was beaten by him for her pains. A town meeting on 21 May revoked Joshua's liberty to vote in punishment, effectively privileging Jane's liberty of conscience over Joshua's rights as head of his household.

From this brief vignette, Manchester follows various threads that lead her to both sides of the Atlantic, and to the heart of many of the most urgent political and spiritual debates of the mid-seventeenth century. She argues that Joshua and Jane's case – the first example, she claims, of ‘a wife's liberty of conscience, independent from her husband's’ to be ‘upheld in the English colonies’ (p. 1) – contains ‘in microcosm the forces at work in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay during the 1630s’ (p. 144). She seeks to learn more about ‘the larger puritan and/or English narrative’ of the period, and how questions of liberty of conscience, organisation of society and Church and gender relations were dealt with outside of prescriptive texts such as those of William Gouge or Robert Cleaver (both of which she cites).

As important and attractive a task this is, it is also fraught with challenges. Early on, Manchester admits that Jane Verin has left us no diaries or letters with which to understand her perspective or position; the book is therefore full of ‘must haves’ or ‘would haves’ – assumptions, in other words, which whether sturdy or otherwise cannot quite be proved. Manchester ranges widely, from Cotton Mather and Anne Hutchinson to John Locke and Edward Coke; occasionally the Verins become a little lost in the flood.

Manchester is aware that ‘puritans were not a homogenous group’ (p. 111) and traces the various influences on Providence's inhabitants as well as the sources available about them allow; on the other hand, the difference between a Perkins or a Cleaver, or between England and New England, are not always clear. Nevertheless, there is something exciting about the book, and it should be read generously. It opens inquiries into the histories of domestic violence and women's piety and religious liberty in this period, and should inspire others to investigate the conditions of Puritan women with a closer and keener attention paid to their own lived experiences, and the way in which elite discourse interacted – or did not – with those. Indeed, in her comparison of Jane with other Puritan women, both well known and less so, Manchester's book often hits its mark. Work such as this can deepen, enliven and broaden our appreciation of how spirituality was imagined, implemented and governed in the past – and this book offers a good guide to how we might do so, as well as to the perils such work must overcome.