Mary Rowlandson and Restorative Reading

Abstract

This article explores the concept of restorative reading, defined as a practice in which sacred texts are read for affective assurances of previously established religious convictions, as it is described in A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). I identify nine scenes of restorative reading in the narrative, and interpret each of them through a theological framework constructed by readings of the major Puritan theologians William Perkins, William Ames, John Preston, and Richard Baxter and with attention to the Augustinian Christian tradition to which their thinking on religious emotions is indebted. The article contends that Rowlandson participates in the Puritan theological discourse on the affections as much by writing from it as by living it out, and that her narrative furthermore preserves, though it antagonistically misreads, Indigenous understandings and uses of the emotions. The arguments in this article can be best understood in the context of discourses on the postsecular and the postcritical in literary studies.