Mary Rowlandson
Mary Rowlandson wrote the account of her captivity during King Philip's War, published in 1682 as The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, one of the most widely read books of colonial New England.
Biography
Mary Rowlandson (about 1637 to 1711 AD), born Mary White, was born in England and came to New England as a small child with her parents. The family later settled at Lancaster, a frontier town in central Massachusetts, where her father was among the early settlers.
At Lancaster she married Joseph Rowlandson, the town's first minister, and they had several children. On 10 February 1676, during King Philip's War, Lancaster was attacked while Joseph was in Boston asking the colony's leaders for soldiers to protect the town. Mary and three of her children were taken captive. Her youngest, Sarah, died of her wounds nine days later. Mary was held for eleven weeks and five days, much of it in the household of the Narragansett sagamore Quinnapin and his wife Weetamoo, before she was ransomed for twenty pounds in early May. Her son Joseph and daughter Mary were recovered that summer.
After a period in Charlestown and Boston, the family moved in 1677 to Wethersfield, Connecticut, where Joseph became minister. He died there in November 1678. In 1682 her account of her captivity was printed at Cambridge, Massachusetts, under the title The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, and in London the same year. By then she had married Samuel Talcott of Wethersfield, in 1679. He died in 1691, and she lived on in Wethersfield until her death in January 1711.
Life & Career
Why Rowlandson Matters
Rowlandson's book is a sustained reading of one person's suffering in the light of God's providence. Its published title, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, states the argument: the attack, the hunger, the death of her daughter and her release all come from the same hand, and all of it is for good. She sets out the events remove by remove, and almost every one ends with a passage of Scripture that came to her as she read the Bible a raider had given her. The book shows how a Puritan layperson, not a minister, applied the Bible to daily experience, including the days when it seemed to give no comfort.
The narrative also carries the Puritan habit of reading public events as signs. Rowlandson treats the English army's failure to cross the Baquaug River, and the survival of her captors through the winter, as God's judgment on a colony that had grown careless, and the turn of the war that summer as his answer to prayer. Her personal story becomes a lesson for New England as a whole.
It was the first New England captivity narrative published as a book of its own, and it was reprinted many times. Later accounts, such as John Williams's The Redeemed Captive of 1707, followed the same pattern of captivity read as trial and deliverance read as mercy.