1660 was a year of crisis for the Puritan colonies in New England. The Restoration represented a political threat; leading members of the founding generation were dying; and a doctrinal crisis was brewing over the criteria for accepting the next generation for baptism.
In addition, the colonies came under spiritual attack. The arrival of Quakers in Massachusetts from 1656 represented a new type of challenge, because rather than criticising New England Puritanism for its religious radicalism, they denigrated it as conservative and reactionary. Furthermore, they did so using the same rhetoric and arguments that Puritan radicals had previously directed against the English religious establishment. I will argue that as a result, they were treated as a serious threat to the dominant colonial powers, because they usurped and rewrote the narratives that the colonists had constructed about their own spiritual history as a people, and did so at a time when their image of themselves was already under threat.

—Dr Alison Stanley, King’s College London