"Free Liberty To Keep Away From Us": The Law and Language of Banishment in Seventeenth-Century New England

FAIN: FT-58299-10

Nan Goodman
Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder (Boulder, CO 80303-1058)

My book project, "Free Liberty to Keep Away From Us": The Law and Language of Banishment in Seventeenth-Century New England, examines how the frequent use of banishment in seventeenth-century New England figured in the legal rituals of community formation. To do this, I turn to what I call the banishment narratives of the time--the countless pamphlets, correspondence, testimony, and histories written about and often in response to the law and that have largely been overlooked by scholars of the period. These narratives reveal how central banishment was to the arguments over the common law and how it was used to answer questions about sovereignty, or legal authority; jurisdiction, or the space over which that authority was exercise and identity, or who the subjects of the government were and how they related to each other and the law. As a result of this work, we will, I hope, be able to read early American arguments over authority and identity that were not legible before.