Abstract

Social historian Roger Thompson brings the forgotten and faceless men and women in 17th-century Massachusetts to suggest that records from Middlesex County of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay show that the puritan social system was not so rigid and the relationships between sexes not so regulated as some historians have suggested. The argument of 'Sex in Middlesex' is revisionist: the 'puritans' and 'theocrats' who throng its pages do not behave in accordance with popular stereotype or conform tot he interpretations of major historians.