Literature to 1800

All early Americanists owe a great debt to the faithful labor of William J. Scheick, who for nearly three decades prepared this chapter. Those of us too young to remember scouring through well-thumbed card catalogues and reams of journals before computer technology, online databases, and amazon.com put the fun back into the paper chase can hardly imagine the time and effort Scheick invested in keeping us up-to-date in our discipline. Surely, there are more lives to be lived, and Scheick is now free in his retirement to move on to several of them. He has our deepest thanks.

i The Colonial Period

a. Exploration, First Encounters, and Communication

The first annotated English translation and edition of Spanish accounts of exploration and settlement of Florida is furnished by Juan Carlos Mercado and Laura Callahan in Menédez De Aviléz and La Florida: Chronicles of His Expeditions (Mellen). Richly contextualized, this edition provides firsthand accounts of the capture of Fort Caroline, the founding of St. Augustine, and imperial hegemony in Spanish Florida. A fresh translation of choice Jesuit missionary letters (1632-73) is offered in Catharine Randall's Black Robes and Buckskin: A Selection from the Jesuit Relations (Fordham). The collection offers valuable insights on Jesuit piety and Ignatian spirituality, female supporters behind the Native missions in Canada, and the regnant syncretic approach to blending Christian and Native beliefs. The heroic missionary activities of Jesuits are also at the center of Emma Anderson's "Blood, Fire, and 'Baptism': Three Perspectives on the Death of Jean de Brébeuf, Seventeenth-Century Jesuit 'Martyr,'" pp. 125-58 in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape (No. Car.), a gathering of 13 essays edited by Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas. Examining from multiple perspectives the complex issue of contact between Native Americans and European missionaries, Anderson points out that scholars largely misread the representation of Brébeuf's death because they interpret his "martyrdom" solely through the lens of medieval hagiography without including the perspectives of the Iroquois and recusant Hurons—each utilizing the spectacle of Brébeuf's death and his relics for different religious purposes. In the same volume Joanna Brooks, "Hard Feelings: Samson Occom Contemplates His Christian Mentors" (pp. 23-37), notes that scholars of the postcolonial period frequently dismiss Native American Christianity as of no value to community building among Native populations. However, in turning to Samson Occom Brooks reveals a more positive side to Christian theology, which taught Occom and praying Indian communities at large how to cope with the harsh traumas of their colonization in meaningful ways. Revisionism is also at the heart of Matt Cohen's The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minnesota), which challenges the old paradigm that early New England print culture vastly outperformed oral culture of Native Americans. In combining the seemingly incompatible study of the history of the book with Native American studies and in focusing on the "technologies" of communication between settlers and indigene (as described by William Bradford, Thomas Morton, Edward Winslow, and Roger Williams), Cohen argues that a kind of "multimedia literacy" existed that informed the modes of communication with Amerindian communities.

b. Alchemy, Mammon, and the Body Politic

John Winthrop Jr.'s interest in alchemy has long been known. Previous generations of scholars, however, have largely dismissed his alchemical proclivities as aberrations unworthy of serious study. Walter W. Woodward's Prospero's America: John Winthrop Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England, 1606-1676 (No. Car.) redresses this oversight in this fresh study of the significance of the younger Winthrop, whose alchemical pursuits and pansophic quest for universal knowledge were markedly shaped by his Comenian agenda of spiritual regeneration and preparation for the Second Coming. Religion and Mammon always shared an uneasy coexistence in Puritan New England, or did they? In a fresh study titled Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton), Mark Valeri's archival research illuminates the perspective of four Boston merchants (Robert Keayne, John Hull, Samuel Sewall, and Hugh Hall) and how the changing market conditions and the homiletic...