650 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY utes, Moravian records, and other sources spanning 1682–1785. While that appendix—and the work it could inspire—provide a fuller sense of the lives of Munsee Indians, they do little to elucidate another of the ledger’s mysteries: the identity of the bookkeeper whose handwriting is distinct from that recording transactions on colonists’ accounts. The unpublished remainder of the account book could conceivably contain clues to that identity as well as each bookkeepers’ relation to Indian affairs in the Ulster County region. But, the editors clearly chose to privilege the more exceptional contents of the manuscript over less unusual material documenting trade relations between colonists. That decision exemplifies Smith and Waterman’s central concern with making widely accessible for the first time an invaluable, detailed, intriguing primary source that raises as many questions as it answers, and that will undoubtedly serve as the basis for further studies. Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time. By Donna Merwick. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, 248 pages, $59.95 Cloth. Reviewed by D.L. Noorlander, SUNY Oneonta Donna Merwick’s new book on Peter Stuyvesant begins at the end: with the final frustrating months of his administration and the loss of New Netherland to English conquerors. This is no biography, but a threepart , eleven-chapter “essay” organized around the themes of duty, belief, and loss—or what the author calls “the trope of loss” (xii). The last of the three is most important, permeating the book from start to finish, providing a central reference point in a sometimes-muddled, sometimes-insightful exploration of the competitive, precarious times in which Stuyvesant lived. Merwick argues that one can only understand New Netherland’s most famous governor by abandoning our obsession with modernity and recognizing that he inhabited a pre-modern, post-Reformation world. Examples of this post-Reformation thinking abound. In the first section, on Stuyvesant’s oath and duties, the author explains the sacred meaning of the oath and the fuzzy boundary between secular and ecclesiastical author- Book Reviews 651 ity. Stuyvesant was simultaneously a servant of the West India Company (WIC) and protector of the public church, the man who paid the clergy and the soldiers. He had to worry about smuggling, border disputes, land sales, customs collection, and defense—but also about marriage law and religious confessionalism. He even oversaw the colony’s bakers and baking regulations , which Merwick describes as “a premodern system that looked to obligations not liberties, to the ethics of corporate obligation not individualism ” (23). In political conflicts with colonists over WIC government and disputes with Quakers and other non-conformers, he earned a reputation for severity, even tyranny. Yet she argues that his rhetoric and policies were typical for the time period: Other rulers also worried about sedition and loyalty; still others feared the anarchy and insubordination that Quakers purportedly inspired. Merwick again reminds readers to see and think like a seventeenth-century European when, for example, she writes about the governor’s efforts to obtain volunteers for the colonial militia. He failed not because the town magistrates disliked him or because of some precocious democratic impulse among the Dutch. Rather, a certain “prenationalist localism,” “premodern particularism,” and “civic corporatism” allowed communities (according to Dutch tradition) to act first in their own defensive self-interest (54). Merwick’s style will probably repel more people than it attracts. Quite admirably, she tries to make her sources real, she tries to help us see them and engage with them as any good teacher and historian would—almost like she’s encountering them herself for the first time as one reads. The result is a lot of first and second person, a good deal of I, me, you, and us. As she studies Stuyvesant’s journal, she is “with him,” and she wants us to be there too, wishing we could overhear more conversations and “go with him to church, have a look at where he was living” (61, 132). This desire is a natural extension of the argument about time and context. But one starts to feel that the author is trying too hard. Her artsy, literary flair sometimes does more to...