Teresa Toulouse - The Sovereignty and Goodness of God in 1682: Royal Authority, Female Captivity, and "Creole" Male Identity - ELH 67:4 ELH 67.4 (2000) 925-949 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God in 1682: Royal Authority, Female Captivity, and "Creole" Male Identity Teresa Toulouse Much past scholarship placed Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative in the context of generalized Puritan views of providence or typology. Challenging such assumptions, current scholarship has largely been dedicated to locating the text's gendered resistance to orthodoxy. More recently, scholars such as Tara Fitzpatrick, Nancy Armstrong, and Leonard Tennenhouse have offered a third line of inquiry, arguing in different ways that Rowlandson's and other women's narratives performed larger "cultural work" than assumptions either about complicity or about resistance had fully considered. Whereas Fitzpatrick notes Rowlandson's and other captives' interpretive battles with ministerial editors, for example, she is less concerned with personal resistance than with how widely circulated representations of the woman in the wilderness eventually came to transform elite and popular religious constructions of "nature" and of "covenant." Captivity narratives by women indicated that conversion could be an individual rather than a corporate covenantal experience, and that it could occur in a nature that was not demonic, but possibly even redemptive. Fitzpatrick shows how the captivities of...