In the autumn of 2011, an inventive team of Brown University undergraduates began deciphering cryptic shorthand notations written by Roger Williams (1604–1683) in the margins of a seventeenth-century book on religious toleration. Williams's notations responded to a transatlantic controversy in which John Eliot, New England's “Apostle to the Indians,” had defended infant baptism against the arguments of the London Baptist John Norcott. Eliot's tract, A Brief Answer to a Small Book written by John Norcot Against Infant-Baptisme, was published in 1679, and Williams's shorthand rebuttal of Eliot thus reveals views Williams held late in life, after his controversy with the Quakers and his engagement in King Philip's War.

Throughout his long career as a religious controversialist, Williams had based his famous advocacy of religious liberty in a more general concept of the nature of the church. His refutation of Eliot's views on baptism and conversion thus reflected his longstanding questions about the efficacy and religious authority of modern evangelistic efforts. Although Decoding Roger Williams does not significantly revise scholarly interpretations of Roger Williams, it effectively summarizes the seventeenth-century transatlantic debates over baptism and evangelization; it reprints the pamphlets by John Norcott and John Eliot; and it presents the new transcription of Williams's “Brief Reply” to Eliot. Most intriguingly, the book introduces the reader to early modern procedures of shorthand and then explains how remarkable detective work by the Brown University team “cracked the code” of Roger Williams's shorthand system. Their accomplishment will surely be a stimulus to further research on writing and religion in early America.