Adrian Chastain Weimer
Professor
Education:
Ph.D. - Harvard University
Area(s) of Expertise:
Adrian Chastain Weimer is a historian of seventeenth century North America and the early modern Atlantic world. She is on leave in 2025 as a Longterm Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library.
Her most recent book, A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) was awarded the John Winthrop Prize from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. It centers on grass roots political mobilizing in the 1660s, when puritan colonists creatively organized to protect local institutions from the demands of the newly restored Stuart monarchy.
She is currently working on a new book, James Quannapohit’s Wars: Alliance and Survival in the Northeast, 1666-1688. The book tells the story of diplomacy and struggle among Native Puritans and their English and Indigenous allies from the Mohawk War to King William's War.
Weimer is also co-editing The Collected Works of Daniel Gookin, to be published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. The Bay Colony's Commissioner for Indian Affairs, Gookin (1612-1687) wrote detailed histories of "Praying Indian" communities and their wartime suffering.
Her first book, Martyrs' Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (Oxford, 2011) details how puritans, Baptists, and Quakers imagined themselves within historical narratives of persecution, especially the stories in John Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs.”
Other interests include the history of toleration, practices of reading and writing, and the contributions of religious minorities such as Quakers to colonial American thought and political culture. Recent articles appear in the William and Mary Quarterly, the New England Quarterly, Early American Literature, and Church History.
Weimer's work has been honored with the Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize, the Michael Kennedy Prize, and has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Selected Publications:
Books
Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).
*Winner of the John Winthrop Prize
The Collected Works of Daniel Gookin, co-edited with David D. Hall (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts/University of Virginia Press [forthcoming 2025])
Multimedia Public History
"The 1664-1665 Resistance Petitions," Commonwealth Museum. Video interview, primary source collection, and curriculum materials, 2024, https://www.sec.state.ma.us/mus/webcast-petitions.html
Articles and Book Chapters
“Restoration Puritanism in the Atlantic World, 1660-1700,” in the Oxford Handbook of Puritanism, eds. Francis Bremer, Ann Hughes, and Greg Salazar (Oxford University Press [forthcoming 2025]).
“Daniel Gookin's ‘Doings and Sufferings,’ and the Contradictions of the New England Mission,” with David Hall, American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounterss and the Boundaries of Book History, eds. Glenda Goodman and Rhae Lynn Barnes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).
“Political Reform and Devotional Culture in Early New England,” in Understanding and Teaching Religion in American History, eds. Karen Johnson and Jonathan Yeager (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024).
“Michael Wigglesworth,” Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
The “Contynuance of our Civell and Religious Liberties”: Plymouth Colonists’ 1665 “Humble Addrese” to the King,” Early American Literature 56.1 (2021): 219-232.
“The Quaker ‘Invasion,’” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, Vol. 1, ed. Susan Juster (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
“Colonial Quakerism,” co-authored with Andrew Murphy, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, ed. John Coffey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
“The Resistance Petitions of 1664-1665: Confronting the Restoration in Massachusetts Bay,” New England Quarterly 92, No. 2 (June 2019): 221–262.
“Quakers, Puritans, and the Problem of Godly Loyalty in the Early Restoration” in The Worlds of William Penn, eds. Andrew Murphy and John Smolinski (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 283-302.
“Huguenot Refugees and the Meaning of Charity in Early New England,” Church History (June 2017): 365-397.
“Elizabeth Hooton and the Lived Politics of Toleration in Massachusetts Bay,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 74, No. 1 (January 2017): 43-76.
*Winner of the Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize
“Martyrdom in North America,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. John Corrigan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
“Holmes, Obadiah,” in American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
“From Human Suffering to Divine Friendship: Meat out of the Eater and Devotional Reading in Early New England,” Early American Literature 51.1 (2016): 3-39.
“Affliction and the Stony Heart in Early New England,” in Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World, eds. Alec Ryrie and Tom Schwanda (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 121-143.
“Heaven and Heavenly Piety in Colonial American Elegies” in The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul, eds. Peter Clarke, Tony Claydon (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2009).
*Winner of the Michael Kennedy Prize
“Gould, Thomas” in American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
