Mary and William Dyer : Quaker light and Puritan ambition in early New England / Johan Winsser.

Includes index.

Introduction -- Divided Lincolnshire -- Westminster apprenticeship -- Saint Martin-in-the-Fields -- Looking to Massachusetts -- Godly Boston -- The churches on fire -- The trees swept bare -- The woman who had the monster -- Settling Aquidneck -- On the edge of anarchy -- Some gusts among us -- Turbulent and incorrigible -- Greater enemies -- The cross fled -- Esther -- An intractable dilemma -- William Dyre, after Mary -- Epilogue -- Appendix: The Dyer letters.

Mary Dyer is widely esteemed as one of the "Boston martyrs"--Four Quakers hanged by the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1659 and 1661. When she returned to Boston in 1660, after having been banished twice from Massachusetts, she committed an act of deliberate civil disobedience that cost her her life, led to the downfall of the puritan government, and advanced the fundamental principles of freedom of conscience and expression -- Publisher's description.