“I Hear No Things Laid to My Charge”: Aurality in Anne Hutchinson’s Trial Transcript

This essay uses the power of aesthetics to explain a controversial moment in early American law: Anne Hutchinson’s confession toward the end of her 1637 trial in the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that she had experienced an “immediate revelation” from God “by the voice of his own spirit to my soul.” Far from being an aberration in a trial that was otherwise trending in her favor, as most critics suggest, Hutchinson's revelation, this paper argues, when read aesthetically and with an emphasis on the auditory sense, marks a crisis not between church and state or between religion and the law, but within the early modern legal approach to aurality