Reading Roger Williams

"""Roger Williams is well known for his insistence on religious freedom. This careful, intelligent anthology highlights another major aspect of his long life as writer, activist, and citizen in New England, his understanding of local Native Americans, and his relationship to the policies--endorsed (or criticized)--of his fellow colonists towards those people. Filled with unexpected evidence at every turn!"" --David D. Hall, professor of New England church history emeritus, Harvard Divinity School ""Who was Roger Williams? You will learn to know him in this carefully curated collection both as a radical puritan who worked for the liberty of conscience as he understood it, and as a self-proclaimed 'friend of the Indians' who joined in the settler colonial conquest of Narragansetts, Pequots, and other Native peoples. This is an essential guide to Williams and to the contradictions and cruelties of the seventeenth-century English colonial world."" --Tisa Wenger, professor of American religious history, Yale Divinity School ""Reading Roger Williams is no mere compilation of an icon's works. Drawing on the best recent scholarship and placing carefully selected excerpts of Williams's public and private writings alongside the words of his contemporaries, the authors embed a very human Williams in rich historical contexts. Readers hoping to understand the religious, political, and personal underpinnings of English attempts to colonize Indigenous America can find no better guide on their journey."" --Daniel K. Richter, professor emeritus of American history, University of Pennsylvania ""Roger Williams is among the most controversial figures in colonial America. Some historians dismiss him as almost irrelevant; others consider him enormously significant. For example, W. K. Jordan, author of the classic Development of Religious Toleration in England, said Williams provided 'the most important contribution' to the development of toleration in the seventeenth century--a century which included Locke. Reading Roger Williams allows readers to make their own decision."" --John M. Barry, author of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty ""Notoriously cranky, complex, and diverse, Roger Williams shines as a religious liberator and repels as an exploiter of Natives. Prolific, provocative, brilliant, and often dense, his writings both need and reward the insights so richly applied by three deft scholars with deep expertise in colonial New England and its Native context. This collection reveals Williams as the most compelling, maddening, and revealing colonist of his century."" --Alan Taylor, author of American Colonies: The Settlement of North America ""Revealing Roger Williams to be a highly capable, complicated, and irascible man who betrayed his own principles without fully realizing what he had done, this excellent documentary history is exceptionally well-conceived. The editors situate carefully chosen documents in historical context to reveal both the idealism and the tragedy of New England's founding."" --Amanda Porterfield, author of Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation"