Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) was a religious dissident who was brought to trial by John Winthrop (1588-1649) and the other magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 for spreading "erroneous opinions" regarding religious belief and practice. She is known as the central figure in the Antinomian Controversy.
The Antinomian Controversy (antinomian from the Greek for “against the law”) challenged the authority of the colony's magistrates, and, even though Hutchinson defended herself through references to the Bible and her own reputation for piety, she was convicted of spreading false beliefs and banished.
The Bay Colony had been established by Winthrop on the precept of complete conformity to Puritan theology in order to honor the covenant the colonists had made with God by which they would do his will, and he would reward them with the blessings of success.
The dissident Roger Williams (1603-1683) had been banished in 1636, and the preacher John Wheelwright (Hutchinson's brother-in-law) was expelled in 1637 for a sermon he gave advocating the primacy of God's grace over humanity's works in attaining salvation (the central argument of the Antinomian Controversy). Both of these men, and Hutchinson, preached in accordance with the vision of the reformer John Calvin (1509-1564), whose views informed the Puritanism of Massachusetts Bay Colony, as well as Puritanism generally, but their emphasis on grace over works upset the status quo.
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