Leader of the largest Indian mission in seventeenth-century Anglo-America, John Eliot has attracted extensive attention from ethnohistorians, anthropologists, religionists and, more recently, literary scholars like Kathryn Gray. She examines his relationship with the Massachusetts Algonquians and the process of their conversion to Christianity by positioning Eliot as a ‘conduit’ connecting ‘disparate and, sometimes, fragile communities’ (p. xii) of English, New English and Native readers. The first two chapters cover the relationships that he created in the Old Country by writing to private correspondents and contributing to publications – the ‘Eliot Tracts’ – that circulated openly in ‘metropolitan and rural England’ advertising the mission (p. xiv). Although necessary to establish the extent of his networks, these pages traverse familiar ground; decades after the ‘Atlantic World’ became the ruling paradigm for early modern colonial history, it is no longer necessary to argue for tracing the transoceanic circulation of Eliot's work in order to ‘appreciate’ that his mission was ‘inextricably linked’ with ‘contesting political and religious forces’ across the seas (p. 22), a notion now commonplace. The following three chapters focus on Native networks and provide fresher perspectives. The growth of Indian spirituality and its necessary (to New Englanders) concomitant – civility – followed a spatial trajectory that began in private locales (wigwams), moved to ‘larger, codified social spaces’ and culminated in the ‘final confirmation of church membership’ in public meeting houses (p. 72). Regarding women as ‘influential’ members of Native communities (p. 93), missionaries seeking to attract them developed a gendered Evangelical discourse. Eliot's signal valuation of Algonquian dialect as a ‘language of Christianity’ (p. x) underwrote his enterprise to print books – notably the Bible – in Native tongues, simultaneously creating a ‘scribal community of praying Indians’ (p. 122) facile in both oral and literary modes of interpreting the Word. Converts, she rightly asserts throughout, developed a ‘hybrid identity’ (p. 131 and passim) culled from both Native and English traditions, which enabled them to ‘resist linguistic and cultural assimilation’ (p. 141).
Gray's most noteworthy contribution lies in her discussion of Indian women, who have received little notice because the records – including Eliot's accounts of Native conversions – essentially ignore them. Having industriously collected the fragmentary data, Gray moves them from the mission's margins to its centre and proposes why at least a few took up the Cross. Thinking them key to converting ‘whole families’ (p. 97), Eliot actively proselytised them, asserting that ‘Algonquian and Puritan models of womanhood’ were similar (p. 105). As traditional cultural arrangements eroded, fitting into Christian New England may have offered women the prospect that pre-existing social roles ‘would be sustained within a new religious mode’ (p. 109). Conversion offered a ‘different but sustainable way’ (p. 105) to secure their prior status as healers, clan leaders and mothers responsible for their children's upbringing and education. This theory is both original and cogent, though it focuses exclusively on sociological factors. Gray says little about women's religious motivations for joining the Church or the possible differences between their experiences and those of Indian men – how they may have understood sin or the order of salvation, for instance – although she does indicate that Indian women seem to have responded less to some of the erotic undertones of Puritan preaching than did their English sisters.
As this treatment of women demonstrates, Gray is a careful researcher able to catch telling details that others might miss. Her parsing of two letters from ministers attesting their efforts to raise funds for the mission shows just how far news of the mission reached ‘bemused local church-goers across England’ (p. 39). Her excursus of how Eliot in his Indian dialogues wore a Native ‘mask’ that enabled him to ‘critique English society and social hierarchy’ without offending the patrons on whose funding his entire project depended is masterful (p. 50). For all her close reading, however, Gray seems inclined to take her sources at face value without fully explaining the difficulties of interpreting Native voices that are always mediated through (New) English filters. Are the Dialogues ‘semifictional’ (pp. 80, 81) or ‘fictional’ (pp. 90, 93, 108, 123) – and what are the hermeneutic implications of either characterisation? Some statements warrant elaboration. What were the ‘ecclesiastical and theological debates’ in which Richard Baxter's correspondence with Eliot participated, and how did their communication play an ‘important part’ (p. 13)? How did Natick provide the ‘necessary space’ for converts to ‘negotiate the pace and shape of their spiritual adaptation’ (p. 75)? What prompted Eliot's desire to ‘place the written trace of Massachusett at the centre of his missionary project’, thereby setting himself apart from ‘most other missionary-colonizers’ (p. 139)? More generally, one would like to know how Gray understands the significance of her interventions into a heavily contended subject. What is the ‘fuller understanding’ of ‘power relationships and cultural negotiations’ in the mission that the introduction promises (p. xi)? Emphasising the Indians’ adaptability and their insistence on retaining substantial elements of their own spirituality minimises, if inadvertently, the power that New Englanders may have wielded in the relationship, while stressing the fact (as opposed to the content) of Natives’ hybrid Christianity precludes an assessment of just how it differed from both Algonquian religion and ‘orthodox’ English Reformed Protestantism.
John Eliot and the praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay would benefit from probing the pregnant issues that it raises further and engaging the historical and anthropological literatures more fully. It might have touched a bit on another transatlantic discourse community – the clergy serving all the colonial empires – which is briefly referenced via mention that Eliot wrote at least one tract under the influence of the Spanish Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas (p. 32). Eliot is often critiqued for demanding that Indians reject their culture completely as opposed to, say, the Jesuits, who are noted as having taken Native cultures on their own terms. Gray's demonstration that he urged Algonquian as a language of redemption might require us to rethink this appraisal. The book, in sum, will likely appeal more to communities of readers interested in texts and their communicative networks than to those looking for broader comparisons between Eliot's activities and those of his fellow missionaries, English and otherwise.
