Kristina Bross

Dying Saints, Vanishing Savages: "Dying Indian Speeches" in Colonial New England Literature

To observant Puritans, the death of an Indian was always a sign from God. The first settlers noted the epidemics that had swept through coastal communities before their arrival, attributing widespread deaths to God and giving thanks for newly vacant lands. John Winthrop argued in  that ‘‘God hath consumed the natives with a great plague in those parts,’’ and Puritan settlers thus had a ‘‘warrant’’ to settle in New England (Winthrop ). In Pequot War descriptions, Puritan victors exulted in the terrible deaths of their foes: ‘‘But God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven. . . . Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies’’ (Mason ). Forty years later, descriptions of the death of Metacom, whom the colonists perceived as the instigator of King Philip’s War, likewise asserted a providential purpose in his death and dismemberment:

Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (review)

In Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in SeventeenthCentury Massachusetts, Amy M. E. Morris champions early New England poetry, not despite its derivation from plain-style sermons, its awkward syntax, its abjection before other genres, but rather because of these qualities. Morris variously terms the design of poetry by Bay Psalm translators Michael Wigglesworth and Edward Taylor as an “alternative” or “resistant” aesthetic (76, 207). And certainly, a quick glance at the Bay Psalm Book’s rendering of Psalm 23 reveals it to be quite, ahem, “alternative”:

The Great Altepetl of Jerusalem: A Visitor's Guide for the Anglo-Colonialist

Recent review essays in these pages have been interested in texts, such as those considered here, concerningmissionary-Indian encounters. Reviewers have outlined how new critical or theoretical approaches to colonial studies have made possible close scholarly attention to these previously undervalued works, particularly by literary scholars, and they have made the case for more cross-cultural study of such texts. I agree wholeheartedly with these assessments. New attention to Native confession narratives, catechisms, and lexicons is, as Phillip Round suggests, reinvigorating the canon of colonial American literature (382). And by now wemust all agree that although (as HilaryWyss argues) maintaining the ‘‘borders’’ between Anglo-colonialists and other scholars of early America is ‘‘a wonderful mechanism to prevent us all from going mad from overwork’’ we do so

Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (review)

Michael P.Winship’sMakingHeretics is essential reading for those interested in the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Antinomian Controversy or for those continuing the redirection of New England studies away from a monolithic colonial ‘‘mind’’ toward, in Winship’s words, ‘‘the pluralism of American Puritanism’’ (248, n.13). Winship’s work, the first full-length study of the crisis itself in years, mines archival sources anew in order to construct a narrative of events and personalities that he argues have been neglected in most recent approaches to the events of the late 1630s. Even those who will remain unconvinced by his de-emphasis of gender issues or his reconstruction of the crisis from sometimes sketchy sources should find much to admire and much from which to learn. Rather than viewing the controversy as the inevitable collision of the immovable forces of radical and orthodox beliefs, male and female piety, clerical and lay power, and the like, as other critics have, Winship argues that the crisis was not ‘‘fixed and structural.’’ Rather, he sees it as ‘‘political, as personalities, personal agendas, and an ongoing process of judgment calls, stakings of positions, and shifting coalitions, a series of short-term events having short-term effects with cumulative results’’ (2). Here is history before the fact, before those crafty spin doctors Thomas Weld and John Winthrop got a clamp on the publicity issuing from the colony, before Nathaniel Hawthorne thought to bequeath his vexed vision of Anne Hutchinson—heroine? harpy?—to generations of American readers.Winship refocuses our attention; he renames the crisis. Rather than the ‘‘antinomian controversy,’’ which he argues is a retrospective, partisan phrase,