When the bride wakes up, what awaits her is a fated love. Marcus, Viscount of Marlbrooke, is ordered by the king to marry, but on his way to pick up his bride, Marcus encounters a woman who has fallen from her horse. When she wakes up, she has no memory of who she is. Drawn to her beauty and cheerfulness, Marcus gives her a false name and allows her to stay with him. But soon he is shocked when he discovers she’s actually Catherine, the bride he was supposed to pick up! And when her memory returns, she tells him that she’s come to refuse his proposal!

In 1650s England, a young Puritan maiden is on a mission to save the baby of her newly widowed preacher--whether her assistance is wanted or not. Always ready to help those in need, Elizabeth ignores John's protests of her aid. She's even willing to risk her lone marriage prospect to help the little family. Yet Elizabeth's new role as nanny takes a dangerous turn when John's boldness from the pulpit makes him a target of political and religious leaders. As the preacher's enemies become desperate to silence him, they draw Elizabeth into a deadly web of deception. Finding herself in more danger than she ever bargained for, she's more determined than ever to save the child--and man--she's come to love.

This treatise documents the claim that, for Puritan men and women alike, the ideals of selfhood were conveyed by female images. It argues that these images taught self-control, shaped pious ideals and established the standards against which the moral character of real women was measured.

DIVA queer literary and cultural studies examination of the wedding ceremony (rather than the resulting marriages) which finds it to be a space of more open possibilities than might normally be supposed./div

The comprehensive history of a system of faith that shaped the nation.

Colonial New Englanders would have found our modern notions of free speech very strange indeed. Children today shrug off harsh words by chanting "sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me," but in the seventeenth century people felt differently. "A soft tongue breaketh the bone," they often said. Governing the Tongue explains why the spoken word assumed such importance in the culture of early New England. Author Jane Kamensky re-examines such famous Puritan events as the Salem witch trials and the banishment of Anne Hutchinson to expose the ever-present fear of what the puritans called "sins of the tongue." But even while dangerous or deviant speech was restricted, Kamensky points out, godly speech was continuously praised and promoted. Congregations were told that one should ones voice "like a trumpet" to God and "cry out and cease not." By placing speech at the heart of familiar stories of Puritan New England, Kamensky develops new ideas about the relationship between speech and power both in Puritan New England and, by extension, in our world today.