Native Americans and the Catholic Phase in Puritan Missionary Writing

This essay analyzes the comparisons that English Puritans often made between European Catholics and Native Americans in narratives of encounter between missionaries and the Wampanoag people from the 1640s and 1650s. Despite the virulence of English anti-Catholicism at the time, Puritans often subtly embraced what they saw as the Catholic-like qualities of indigenous people and presented them as signs of the eventual success of the Protestant mission. By investigating these rhetorical maneuvers, the essay spotlights the literary sophistication of these tracts and their efforts to imagine a Scripture-based Indian Protestantism before the existence of the Massachusett Bible.