Roger Williams's Uses of Legal Discourse: Testing Authority in Early New England

The legal establishment in the seventeenth century was increasingly hostile to the use of elaborate language and rhetorical flourish; the copiousness and amplification so typical of Puritan discourse, on the other hand, served to suppress the desire to eliminate abstruse and unverifiable terms, concepts, and doctrines from the debates of the day. A firm believer that there ought to exist some sort of fundamental law (a charter) to curb the excesses of government, Roger Williams presided over a shifting sensibility about power and authority.