Lori Rogers-Stokes
How to Get Excommunicated in Puritan New England
Most people would include “excommunication” on a short list of words they would use to describe the Puritans. It’s true — excommunication was the most powerful form of discipline the Puritans used with wayward members. But they would have referred to it as a tool, not a weapon. Join Lori Rogers-Stokes as she explains excommunication in Woodland New England, pulling vivid stories from two centuries of church records to put names and faces to this infamous practice.
Lori Rogers-Stokes, PhD, (lori.stokes@comcast.net | LinkedIn) is an independent scholar, public historian, and contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital history project making thousands of pages of colonial-era Congregational church records available through digitization and transcription. She is the author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–49: Heroic Souls (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Lori studies the history of Woodland New England, particularly the founding decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when Indigenous people and English colonizers took actions that continue to shape our lives today.
Learn more about New England’s Hidden Histories the digital project of the Congregational Library & Archives that digitizes and provides access to early New England Congregational church records here.
