John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay: Communities and Connections in Puritan New England by Kathryn N. Gray (review)

Kathryn N. Gray's John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay focuses on a small number of books, letters, and pamphlets written by John Eliot and his fellow missionaries in seventeenth-century New England. The texts include Eliot's Algonquian translation of the Bible and his Indian Dialogues, a set of imaginary conversations between Puritan ministers and Indian leaders that were, as Eliot said, "partly historical … and partly instructive to show what might or should have been said" (quoted in Gray, p. 46). Gray also discusses various occasional pieces by Eliot and others, including the eleven multi-authored reports known collectively as "the Eliot Tracts." The tracts described progress on the missionary front, offered detailed accounts of Indian conversions, and solicited funding from potential supporters back home.

Though much shorter and less comprehensive than the massive records of Catholic priests in New France and New Spain, the works discussed by Gray constitute the most substantive account of Puritan missionary work in New England through the first century of settlement. As such, they have long served historians as a primary source for British attitudes toward the native people they encountered. In addition, despite their thoroughly conventional and obviously Euro-centric nature, these accounts also provide detailed and often surprisingly intimate glimpses of indigenous people across the irremediable differences between the two cultures.

Historians have long been interested in the Puritan missionary project and the native people whom it engaged. There is a large body of contemporary work on those topics, ranging from Alden Vaughan's New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (1965), to Richard W. Cogley's John Eliot's Mission to the Indians Before King Philip's War (1999), which is the best study of John Eliot's missionary career in its theological and historical contexts. Readers familiar with that historical corpus will find little new in Gray's book. Nevertheless, her work contributes significantly to the more recent interest in rhetorical and discursive properties of colonial writing, especially generic innovations associated with the literature of contact and their role in the symbolic construction of cultural identity.

The first two chapters of Gray's book focus on Eliot's use of personal correspondence to solicit financial support for his missionary project, and on the broader network of readers established through the circulation of the Eliot tracts. The remaining three chapters focus on less predictable elements of the discursive communities constituted by other books and letters associated with that project. First Gray analyzes the physical spaces that support the conversion narratives reported by the English missionaries—varying from wigwams, campsites, homes and churches, to Harvard's Indian College. Then she turns to the inhabitants of those spaces whose voices were subordinated to the dominant discourse: colonial women and their Indian counterparts, and the native converts known as Praying Indians.

Gray's attention to the physical sites of discursive interactions is the most distinctive feature of her work. Otherwise, her claims often resemble those of other literary historians and cultural theorists who have written on early America, including Mary Louise Pratt, Thomas Scanlan, Hilary Wyss, and Kristina Bross among many others. Gray calls up those predecessors so frequently that the citations become distracting at times, and there are omissions of more recent work that would have enhanced her argument, including Allan Greer's analysis of generic complexities in the Jesuit Relations and Andrew Newman's study of the impact of literacy on relations between European settlers and the Delaware Indians. In addition, the numerous theoretical sources she invokes are not always as compatible as she implies. She persistently conflates reception theory with Stanley Fish's notion of interpretive communities, and she confuses performance theory with the more specific linguistic category of...