Buried in Shades of Night: Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip's War

4. Fractured Histories, Captive Subjects: The Masque of Textual Effacement

95 4 Fractured Histories, Captive Subjects The Masque of Textual Effacement In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears. –Michel Foucault the traumatic events of King Philip’s War and its aftermath left an indelible impression on the Puritan body politic and nationalist colonial identity. As the proliferation of captivity narratives and historical texts in the years that followed illustrates, English conflict with Native nations and the French was widely seen as a sensational and devastating confirmation of God’s illustrious providence. During this same period, Puritan leaders were also struggling to preserve their political autonomy from England, which culminated in the revocation of the Puritan charter in 1689. Despite this development , Puritan leaders were intent on maintaining the social and political order established in the preceding generation by leaders such as William Bradford and John Winthrop. The sense of political disorder arising from the growing rift with the English Crown was 96 chapter four exacerbated by a restless and fragmenting population that had grown, with the expansion of frontier settlements ever farther from Boston and Plymouth, increasingly detached from Puritan authority. For ministers such as Increase Mather and William Hubbard, the impulse to reassert ecclesiastical control and restore order found expression in a two-pronged ideological approach intended to strengthen Puritan community. It was hoped that the improvement of social cohesion could be accomplished through the instruction offered in sermons and jeremiads, as a supplement to the sponsorship and production of historical and literary texts. In his work on the history of printing in colonial New England, George Selement has documented the prodigious output of Puritan ministers during this period. As a case in point, Selement cites Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, which affirms the responsibilities of Puritan clergy to not only exhort and admonish but also “Administer the Sacraments, Visit the Afflicted, and manage all parts of Church-Discipline; and if any Books for the service of Religion, be written, Persons thus extreamly incumbred must be the Writers.”1 Corroborating Mather’s exposition of ministerial duties, Selement cites data indicating that between 1561 and 1703 Puritan ministers published 1,567 separate imprints.2 Of these, there were 1,360 imprints published after 1620, with John Cotton, Richard Mather, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather accounting for an astounding 532 works.3 Given these figures, it would be difficult to underestimate the profound and enduring influence these four writers wielded in colonial New England society. The inclination of clergy to produce written texts was also supplemented by the promotion of works composed by other learned settlers that reinforced Puritan ideology. The frequent appearance of introductory and prefatory materials by Puritan ministers in the works of non-clergy became a primary method of promotion and endorsement for the work of lay writers. Although “The Preface To The Reader” that introduces The Soveraignty and Goodness of God is credited to the pseudonymous Ter Amicam, the author’s decision to conceal his identity has fueled much speculation, with most scholars attributing the text to Increase Mather. Before the issue of the preface is addressed, however, it is essential that we consider the Fractured Histories, Captive Subjects 97 conditions surrounding the production of The Soveraignty and Goodness of God. The original manuscript on which The Soveraignty and Goodness of God is based is not extant; also, only a few leafs—used in the binding in a copy of Samuel Willard’s Covenant­Keeping (1682)— are all that is known to exist of the first edition that was printed at Boston earlier in the same year.4 The indeterminacy created by this situation has provided the impetus to scrutinize the historical integrity and authorship of the text. Within months of the publication of this lost first edition, two successive reprints were issued in Cambridge , Massachusetts, on the press of Samuel Green, with another printed in London, England, by Joseph Poole. It seems reasonable to assume that the lost first edition would have been used as the copy-text for the first of the two Cambridge editions, as well as for the London edition.5 Citing the unpublished scholarship of Robert Diebold, Kathryn Derounian-Stodola also expresses this view, “but because of the many variants in the two Cambridge editions,” she takes...