Reviewed by Michelle Burnham | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2

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Reviewed by Michelle Burnham | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

William Bradford's Books: Of Plimmoth Plantation and the Printed Word. By Douglas Anderson. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 280. $45.00.)

Reviewed by Michelle Burnham , Santa Clara University

With the exception of two surviving dialogues and a handful of verses—which few have read and even fewer have seriously studied—William Bradford is known as the author of one book: the journal or history Of Plimmoth Plantation. This fact makes the plural "books" in the title of Douglas Anderson's book register initially as something of a surprise. On the one hand, Anderson's title refers to the library of books and letters available to Bradford as he wrote. Anderson argues that Bradford functioned as both "the compositor and the author of his book" (p.12), which he meant "to be printed ... and set alongside other printed books of its own day" (p. 32). The first chapter situates Bradford's book in relation to a rich late-Renaissance print tradition and to particular European writers and texts that served as models for his own book's form and content. These include the work of William Perkins, Francis Bacon, Jean Bodin, and Peter Martyr. The second chapter establishes a similarly rich context of New England tracts and pamphlets that formed a "network of intersecting texts" (p. 73) for Of Plimmoth Plantation and that function as "satellite documents that revolve around Bradford's history" (p.75), including Robert Cushman's 1622 sermon on self-love, the 1622 Relation or Journall, and Edward Winslow's 1624 Good Newes from New-England.

But Anderson's deliberate use of the plural "books" in his title also evokes an interpretive strategy that he locates in William Perkins, whose 1607 Arte of Prophecying indicates that even the smallest linguistic elements, the sentences or words, of scripture can be opened to become "'books' in themselves" (p. 46). Throughout, but particularly in his study's second half, Anderson performs precisely this kind of hermeneutic on Bradford's single book, making it—through his own strategy of repeated close reading and historical and literary (re)contextualizing—multiply into something like a series of overlapping, interpenetrating books contained within one. Much of this is accomplished by using, not the version of Bradford that most of us read and teach (Samuel Eliot Morison's 1952 edition, which modernized Bradford's spelling and also rearranged many of Bradford's additions to his narrative), but the manuscript itself, which was written on recto leaves; on the versos, Bradford occasionally inserted later commentary, letters, or additional material. By reading the manuscript version of Bradford's book, Anderson is able to recognize and interpret Bradford's verso interjections as responses to or complications of their recto counterparts—such as a record of Boston's hanging of John Billington that appears on a verso page facing an account of a Charlestown epidemic, a "narrative collation" that can be read as a criticism of "judicial actions" (p. 64). Likewise, when John Winthrop's letters are reinserted where Bradford placed them, instead of in the appendix to which Morison consigned them, Bradford's account of the Pequot War emerges as far more critical than it has generally been seen. The result is a fascinating and significant rereading of Bradford's chronicle, one that treats Of Plimmoth Plantation as a book as well as a text and its author as a historian as well as a writer.

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