Description:
Native converts to Christianity, dubbed "praying Indians" by seventeenth-century English missionaries, have long been imagined as benign cultural intermediaries between English settlers and "savages." More recently, praying Indians have been dismissed...
Brief description: Kristina Bross is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University.
Review Quotes:
In this important and provocative book, Kristina Bross argues that seventeenth-century accounts of British missionary work among the Indians in colonial New England constitute a 'Transatlantic debate' (p. 101), in which English writers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean used the of the Indian proselyte to construct their own spiritual and national identities.... Bross's precise and sophisticated attention to the discursive dimensions of this literature distinguishes her work from that of other scholars who have recently turned to Puritan missionary writing to reconstruct the life of indigenous peoples in colonial New England.... Her subtly nuanced close readings effectively demonstrate the literary sophistication and historical significance of these works, and her analysis of subjectivity within a 'Triangular' structure among Indians, colonists, and English Puritans is an important contribution to postcolonial studies of early America.
--Michael P. Clark, University of California, Irvine "The Journal of American History"