Reviewed by Andrew Newman | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.4

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Reviewed by Andrew Newman | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians and Colonial American Identity. By Kristina Bross . (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. Pp. x, 257. $50.00 cloth; $21.95 paper.) Reviewed by Andrew Newman , University of Southern California
Throughout this evocative study, Kristina Bross displays a fine sensitivity to rhetorical nuance. In a characteristic moment in the third chapter, for example, she notes the ambivalence in the title of the first of the so-called Eliot Tracts, the series of collectively authored publications promoting evangelical work in New England between 1647 and 1671: The Day-Breaking, If Not the Sun-Rising of the Gospell with the Indians in New-England; and a True Relation of Our Beginnings with the Indians. Bross suggests that the metropolitan gaze toward "New England" is contested by the colonial "Our"; the metaphorical "Day" of millennial discourse is opposed by the historical time frame and factualism of the "True Relation" genre. She concludes that "the subtitle contrasts with and is perhaps even at odds with the main title" (p. 57).	1
The same might be said of Bross's book; the title's colon marks a disciplinary divide between literary and historical studies. "Dry Bones" is the key figure in the "trope of resurrection" (p. 39) that Eliot introduced into mission discourse by delivering a sermon to the Algonquians on Ezek. 37, implicitly casting the Indians as the pile of bones and himself as the prophet who stirred the wind to revivify them into an army. "Indian Sermons" designates the rhetorical practice of using depictions of the Indians to shame the backsliding English: exhibiting the spectacle of "Indian piety" to combat "English apostasy" (p. 47). By contrast, "Praying Indians in Colonial America" is a historical and demographic categor y. It is also somewhat less representative of the book's content, because Bross necessarily has more to say about the transatlantic "figure of the Praying Indian" (p. 21) than about Indians as historical actors in colonial America. However, she makes a compelling case that the literary construction of the Praying Indian is itself of historical importance.	2
At first glance, Bross appears to use a by-now familiar mode of interdisciplinary intervention: she turns "the lens of literary criticism" (p. 11) onto writings that have hitherto been considered mostly as historical source material, and she repeatedly indicates that her insights are the product of "close reading" (p. 130). This book is less a corrective to historians' accounts of Puritan evangelism, however, than a contribution to the larger field of early American studies, one that places mission literature and the missions themselves within a broader discursive and geographic context. Bross's meticulous attention to language adds both breadth and depth to the historical understanding of the New England missions, instead of flattening it to the plane of representation. In doing so, she elucidates a literary history that is as coherent and clearly delimited as any period or movement that comes under the purview of more traditional literary studies.	. . .

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