The Resurrection of Anne Hutchinson

What would a man do if he were suddenly visited by someone who had lived three hundred and fifty years ago? Someone he had "adopted" as his spiritual ancestor? Someone whom he had fantasized about, dreamed about, written about? Someone who, although she could not be X-rayed or photographed, was real enough to make love to, and who returned his affection with a vibrancy and lustfulness that made him sure that she was real and not just a spirit?

When Anne Hutchinson, the first American religious dissenter and feminist, showed up on Bob Rimmer's doorstep, he was at first skeptical but soon succumbed to Anne's earthy charms. The Resurrection of Anne Hutchinson is the story of two weeks in 1985, when a woman who was banished from Massachusetts in 1638 came back to preach her ideas of freedom in love, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The irrepressible Robert Rimmer, author of The Harrad Experiment, brings Anne Hutchinson back to life in modern-day Massachusetts, where she takes on the people and the government of a repressed United States in a way similar to her original attack on Boston in the seventeenth century. Her companion on a cross-country tour is Bob Rimmer, who embarks with her on a crusade to reach the American public with Anne's message of "repent and rebel."

Rimmer's use of the available literature on Anne (from the diaries of the governor who banished her, John Winthrop, and from Anne's trials) is brilliantly used to evoke seventeenth-century America in a way no history book ever could.