Seventeenth-Century North America Research Articles

“The Boy of Tocutt” and the Demonic Covenant in Seventeenth-Century New England Demonology

ABSTRACT The New England demonic possession narrative, “A Confession of a Boy at Tocutt,” remains conspicuously absent from the rich scholarship on diabolic affliction in seventeenth-century North America. Appearing in Cotton Mather’s 1689Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, this narrative details the torments of one settler, known only as “The Boy of Tocutt,” in Branford Connecticut (ca. 1645–1666). While incomplete, this account is marked by a unique emphasis on the demonic pact and offers a valuable insight into the development of this demonological concept in New England. Through a close reading of “A Confession of a Boy at Tocutt” in the context of Protestant demonic covenant theology, this article establishes the demonological and narrative function of the pact in New England diabolical literature. In doing so, it reconciles this possession narrative with succeeding cases and establishes the versality of the demonic pact in New England demonology.

Introduction to Special issue

Introduction to Special issue

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, by Gerald Horne

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, by Gerald Horne

Settler Colonial Prehistories in Seventeenth-Century North America

Settler Colonial Prehistories in Seventeenth-Century North America

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The roots of slavery, White supremacy, and capitalism in seventeenth-century North America and the Caribbean by Gerald Horne

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The roots of slavery, White supremacy, and capitalism in seventeenth-century North America and the Caribbean by Gerald Horne

Bondsmen, Servants, and Slaves: Social Hierarchies in the Heart of Seventeenth-Century North America

Abstract Between 1669 and 1686, René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle undertook several expeditions in North America. During his journeys, he relied on the services of numerous individuals who were under his control. Some were Indian slaves whom he exchanged like chattel during cross-cultural negotiations while other enslaved natives worked as guides, hunters, and interpreters. His European companions were also enmeshed in unequal relationships that ranged from contracted voyageurs to donnés who labored for Catholic missionaries. This article employs the records left by those who traveled with La Salle to reconstruct the varieties of bondage that they encountered in the heart of the continent.

“Ravishing Odors of Paradise”: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-Century North America

In seventeenth-century North America, efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d'en Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.

Savage Comparisons: Dutch Cultural Distinctions in Seventeenth-Century Southern Africa and North America

During the seventeenth century the Dutch built a global economic system that depended on contact and trade with many different peoples and cultures. To create those connections, Dutch writers particularized and described those cultures to elaborate the role local peoples might play in Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade networks. Yet in southern Africa travelers who encountered Khoekhoe people often described them simply as wilden, or savages. Their choice to employ this catchall category of otherness at the Cape of Good Hope and several other sites around the world correlated with a failure to penetrate these locales commercially and could signal a desire to implement a model of colonization based on production by imported unfree or migrant populations. Scholars of the Dutch North American settlements, where the word wilden was the most common term for indigenous Americans, should be aware of the word's global usage and history.

Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, by Edward E. Andrews

Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, by Edward E. Andrews. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. ix, 326 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). In his first book, Edward Andrews combines meticulous historiography and compelling storytelling to produce a tour-de-force that should interest both specialists and non-specialists alike. In an important sense, Native Apostles does for the history of Christian missionaries throughout the Atlantic World what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker did for the transatlantic history of labour in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Revolutionary History of the Atlantic (Boston, 2000). Though there were hundreds of Amerindian, African, and African-American missionaries operating throughout the early modern British colonial world, we know very little about them until now. Yet by the nineteenth century, the majority of people working in various Protestant world missions were not British. Indeed, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proved pivotal for the colonial globalization of Christianity. Pursuing investigation of these sociohistorical developments and the question of how or indigenous converts and evangelists figured within complex and contested processes of sociocultural interpenetration and change requires a nuanced transatlantic approach. There were likely many more native apostles--including women--than evidenced by the document trail, yet Andrews uncovers a revealing and robust archive, including a plethora of self-authored materials by Christians themselves, which he treats as auto-ethnographic texts of considerable significance. Conversion processes and cumulative generational developments of non-European clergy meant that Black and Indian evangelists throughout the early modern world figured profoundly in evolving transatlantic debates about race and the future of Christendom. Chapter one examines missionary and conversion efforts among Amerindians in seventeenth-century North America, from the first (unsuccessful) English effort to employ evangelists in early seventeenth-century Virginia to the mid-seventeenth century praying towns of eastern Massachusetts and southern New England. The first Christian missionary to Indians in this area was a convert--not John Eliot, as is usually taken to be the case. Indigenous Christians emerged as strategic, thoughtful interpreters of Christianity, espousing variable conversion stories and shepherding a changing field of dynamic bricolage in religious praxis. Native evangelism was fraught with ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions, including a view among some of Christianity as a vehicle for revitalizing ancestral religion. Disciplining and managing orthodoxy, resistance to indoctrination, the unpredictable affordances and effects of diseases, and King Philip's War in the mid-1670s all represented considerable challenges to the Christian project. Puritans had a near monopoly on Protestant evangelization in the British Atlantic world during the seventeenth century, but the ascent of Anglican missionary competition began with the turn of the eighteenth century, as discussed in Chapter two. The Anglican approach was more top-down, manifesting in an early attempt at sending a converted Yamasee Prince to the Carolinas for mission work, but this effort floundered, producing no converted Cherokee or Creek royalty. This experiment was also partly inspired by transcolonial evangelical work in India, yet the lack of real early success in the Atlantic world prompted Anglican regrouping and led to dispensing with their trickle-down model. George Berkeley hatched a plan to build a theological school for formally training Amerindian evangelists in the 1720s that never came to fruition, even after the idea resurfaced two decades later in the Barbados Codrington College effort designed to train slave preachers. These developments reflect new ways of thinking about and taking advantage of conversion, as well as the recursive influences of Christian evangelism vis-a-vis both Native Americans and Blacks. …

“Breathing the Air of a World So New”: Rewriting the Landscape of America in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

This article explores Toni Morrison's preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World. Drawing on scholarship that has investigated dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas, it identifies various counternarratives in Morrison's fiction, tracing these through the earlier Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), but primarily arguing for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The mapping of seventeenth-century North America in the author's ninth novel both exposes colonial relations to place and probes African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is found to recalibrate definitions of “wilderness” with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered within them. The dynamic between the perspectives towards the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant Lina, is examined, as well as the slave girl Florens's formative encounters in American space. Bringing together diverse narrative views, A Mercy is shown to trouble hegemonic settler and masculinist notions of the New World and, especially through Florens's voicing, shape an alternative engagement with landscape. The article goes some way towards meeting recent calls for attention to the intersections between postcolonial approaches and ecocriticism.

“They Have Invaded the Whole River”: Boundary Negotiations in Anglo-Dutch Colonial Discourse

This article argues that boundary contestations between competing colonial powers in seventeenth-century North America need to be understood within a global context. Focusing on Dutch and English colonial and metropolitan writings of the mid-seventeenth century, the article outlines a shift in the way territory was understood by the two competing nations. Colonial powers had originally relied on fixed national traditions to justify their acquisition of colonial territory across the globe; yet, by the mid-seventeenth century colonial powers relied increasingly on an emerging legally codified system to describe territory. By situating Dutch and English colonial and metropolitan writings about intercolonial boundary disputes in North America within the context of both national traditional and emerging international legal systems of territory, the article links seemingly local colonial issues to a global network spanning multiple metropolitan centers and colonial peripheries.

The Rituals of Possession: Native Identity and the Invention of Empire in Seventeenth-Century Western North America

This article examines the social construction of space and identity in the Great Lakes and the western interior of North America. Through analysis of documentary evidence it contrasts the discursive practices of the French empire, which established claims of discovery and possession, with the lived experience of the French fur trade and alliance system. It suggests that the practices of empire, such as renaming people and places and then mapping the newly imagined entities both cartographically and through diplomatic protocol, represented native peoples from an exclusively imperial vantage point. This overly determined perspective obscures the extent to which native social formations in the Great Lakes and western interior operated and evolved independent of their relationships to the empires of the Atlantic world. It concludes that, from an alternative indigenous framework, European claims of discovery and possession in this region represented the rhetoric of empire rather than a genuine expansion of political sovereignty.

Embracing Ambiguity: Native Peoples and Christianity in Seventeenth-Century North America

Embracing Ambiguity: Native Peoples and Christianity in Seventeenth-Century North America

The Jesuit relations. Natives and missionaries in seventeenth-century North America. Edited and introduced by Allan Greer. (The Bedford Series in History and Culture.) Pp. xiii+226 incl. 2 maps and 11 ills. Boston–New York: Bedford–St Martin's, 2000. £8.99 (paper). 0 312 22744 2; 0 312 16707 5

<i>The Jesuit relations. Natives and missionaries in seventeenth-century North America.</i> Edited and introduced by Allan Greer. (The Bedford Series in History and Culture.) Pp. xiii+226 incl. 2 maps and 11 ills. Boston–New York: Bedford–St Martin's, 2000. £8.99 (paper). 0 312 22744 2; 0 312 16707 5

Book Review: The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America

Book Review: The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America

:The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America

Foreword Preface Introduction: Natives North America and the French Jesuits Montagnais Hunters of the Northern Woodlands Jean de Brebeuf on the Hurons Disease and Medicine Diplomacy and War Writings on the Natural Environment Missions to the Iroquois Martyrs and Mystics Exploring the Mississippi Questions for Consideration A Jesuit Relations Chronology Select Bibliography Index

Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France

T| NHE French effort to Christianize the natives of seventeenthcentury North America coincided with one of the last great periods of European (especially French) hagiography.1 Thus, when Catholic France boasted of its missionary achievements, it spoke less of pagan nations converted to the True Faith than of saints vaulted into heaven. The Jesuit Fran~ois Du Creux chose these revealing terms in dedicating his Historia Canadensis to King Louis XIV: Your New France, Louis, has many saints of that very kind that the Apostle mentions everywhere in his Epistles.2 Like the annual Jesuit Relations on which it was based, Du Creux's work is studded with long digressions on the deeds of martyrs and ascetic visionaries, their edifying deaths, and their miraculous post-mortem intercessions; these biographical interjections interrupt the flow of the historical narrative, but they also impart an inner logic to the whole. Historians mining the Catholic missionary sources in search of rich veins of ethnographic description and historical chronicle are well aware of the sacred biography element, though they seldom reflect on it, pre-

The Church of the Immaculate Conception: Inculturation and Identity among the Anishnaabeg of Manitoulin Island

Incursions by the Iroquois quickly forced the Jesuits from the island, and it was not until 1844 that a permanent mission was established at Wikwemikong. Within fifteen years, the mission work had reached West Bay where a church was built in 1910. Missionary activities have since been continuous and here, as elsewhere, have served not only to promote Christianity but frequently to deny the sacrality and legitimacy of Anishnaabe tradition. As was the case with the religion of earliest missionized Algonquians-the Montagnais2Anishnaabe beliefs, practices and symbols were not only replaced by Christian ones but were denounced as demonic in origin. Sixteen years before Poncet set foot on Manitoulin, Paul Le Jeune had set the tone for centuries of Roman Catholic interaction with Native lifeways, declaring that is the forerunner of faith,3 and rejoicing that dread of punishment is beginning to gain such an ascendancy over their minds that, although they do not soon amend, yet they are little by little giving up their evil customs.4 This is not to say that evangelizing through fear mongering is or was exclusive to the Jesuits or even to the Roman Catholics. Nor was it, as Kenneth Morrison has pointed out, entirely or consistently successful despite the cleared ground of cultural anomie available for these seeds in seventeenthcentury North America.5 As Le Jeune, himself was to note: savages agree very readily with what you say but they do not, for all that, cease to act upon their own ideas.6 In other words, the practical political and economic necessity for nominal conversion did not always entail the transformation of consciousness for which the Jesuits had hoped. The life-worlds of many Algonquians, while deeply scarred and changed by political and religious invasion, still provided islands of continuity with tradition. These islands like the one founded by Nanabush after the primordial flood may have rested upon chaos and yet they, too, were constructed from bits of the old order. Taken together, these remainders of tradition have been used to create-on

Town founding in seventeenth-century North America: Jamestown in Virginia

Jamestown in Virginia provides a case study of one facet of the geography of England's overseas expansion in the seventeenth century. Recent discussions of not only Jamestown but all early North American settlements have laid stress on two points. The first towns were founded as entrepôts for international trade in raw materials and were located at central points on colonial coastlines to exert monopoly control over trade. But Jamestown fulfilled neither of these objectives. It was conceived by its promoters, at least initially, as a trading station similar, in many ways, to the Kontors of the Hansa towns and the fondachi of Italian city states. In English institutional terms Jamestown was to be a staple. Its location was off-centre with respect to pre-settlement boundary lines. Its founding was influenced partly by perceptions of the Chesapeake and partly by rivalries in the imperial contest for North America. Jamestown's settlers also had a comprehensive list of town site criteria that included references to trade routes, to site defensibility, and to the physical environment. Although not a prototype for later colonization of the Atlantic Seaboard, Jamestown represented the first settlement form.

"We Are Well As We Are": An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions

H TISTORIANS' interpretations of Christian missions to the Indians in seventeenth-century North America have changed dramatically in the past decade. It had long been traditional historical wisdom to hold that missionaries played an essentially benevolent role in culture contact and change. Merchants, traders, and politicians were usually identified as the agents of change in native American life, while missionaries were associated with otherworldly concerns. Because missionaries were dedicated, self-sacrificing people who truly believed in their task, historians have tended to see them as they saw themselves: as humble servants, saving souls from savagery and damnation, all for the greater glory of God.1 Several scholars have recently challenged this view. Francis Jennings, Robert Berkhofer, Jr., Neal Salisbury, and James Axtell have demonstrated that the Christian mission to native Americans was neither an attempt to save them from land-hungry settlers nor a guileless exercise in soul-winning.2 These historians view it as a revolutionary enterprise, designed to bring about a radical transformation of