John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay: Communities and Connections in Puritan New England by Kathryn N. Gray

Abstract

AmericanJohn Eliot and Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay: Communities and Connections in Puritan New England. By Kathryn N. Gray. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Co-published with The Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., Lanham, MD. 2013. Pp. xix, 171. $70.00. ISBN 978-1-61148503-5.)Kathryn N. Gray's John Eliot and Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay focuses on a small number of books, letters, and pamphlets written by John Eliot and his fellow missionaries in seventeenth-century New England. The texts include Eliot's Algonquian translation of Bible and his Indian Dialogues, a set of imaginary conversations between Puritan ministers and Indian leaders that were, as Eliot said, historical . . . and partly instructive to show what might or should have been said (quoted in Gray, p. 46). Gray also discusses various occasional pieces by Eliot and others, including eleven multi-authored reports known collectively as the Eliot Tracts. The tracts described progress on missionary front, offered detailed accounts of Indian conversions, and solicited funding from potential supporters back home.Though much shorter and less comprehensive than massive records of Catholic priests in New France and New Spain, works discussed by Gray constitute most substantive account of Puritan missionary work in New England through first century of settlement. As such, they have long served historians as a primary source for British attitudes toward native people they encountered. In addition, despite their thoroughly conventional and obviously Euro-centric nature, these accounts also provide detailed and often surprisingly intimate glimpses of indigenous people across irremediable differences between two cultures.Historians have long been interested in Puritan missionary project and native people whom it engaged. There is a large body of contemporary work on those topics, ranging from Alden Vaughan's New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (1965), to Richard W. Cogley's John Eliot's Mission to Indians Before King Philip's War (1999), which is best study of John Eliot's missionary career in its theological and historical contexts. Readers familiar with that historical corpus will find little new in Gray's book. Nevertheless, her work contributes significantly to more recent interest in rhetorical and discursive properties of colonial writing, especially generic innovations associated with literature of contact and their role in symbolic construction of cultural identity.The first two chapters of Gray's book focus on Eliot's use of personal correspondence to solicit financial support for his missionary project, and on broader network of readers established through circulation of Eliot tracts. The remaining three chapters focus on less predictable elements of discursive communities constituted by other books and letters associated with that project. First Gray analyzes physical spaces that support conversion narratives reported by English missionaries-varying from wigwams, campsites, homes and churches, to Harvard's Indian College. Then she turns to inhabitants of those spaces whose voices were subordinated to dominant discourse: colonial women and their Indian counterparts, and native converts known as Praying Indians.Gray's attention to physical sites of discursive interactions is most distinctive feature of her work. Otherwise, her claims often resemble those of other literary historians and cultural theorists who have written on early America, including Mary Louise Pratt, Thomas Scanlan, Hilary Wyss, and Kristina Bross among many others. …