Copyright (c) 2007 University of Nebraska - Lincoln All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scottow Recent documents in Joshua Scottow Papers en-us Sun, 20 May 2007 01:21:48 PDT 3600 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scottow/9 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scottow/9 Fri, 18 May 2007 14:28:58 PDT The following copy of the Letter of Thomas Dudley to the Countess of Lincoln, written in March 1631, is the earliest complete printing of the text. It appeared in the New Hampshire Historical Collections, volume 4 (1834), pages 224-249. It was also issued separately in Concord, N.H., by Marsh, Capen and Lyon that same year. Approximately three-quarters of the letter had previously appeared in 1696, in the volume published in Boston titled Massachusetts, or The First Planters, possibly compiled and edited by Joshua Scottow. This present text was printed from a manuscript discovered "by one of the Publishing Committee" bound in a copy of Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence and Edward Winslow's New England Salamander Discovered. The editor of this text, John Farmer, suggests that this manuscript was the printer's copy for the text printed in 1696, relating that the excerpts are marked for the printer and correspond to the printed 1696 version. This text of the letter was reprinted four years later (in 1838) at Washington, D.C., in volume II of Peter Force's Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, From the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776. Force, however, altered and truncated the brief explanatory passage at the start, describing the manuscript's discovery. The letter has been printed many times since, in numerous modernized versions. Thomas Dudley http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scottow/8 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scottow/8 Thu, 17 May 2007 12:53:00 PDT Dr. Anne Myles, of the University of Northern Iowa, has recently published an article describing her discovery of a previously unattributed work of Joshua Scottow: Divine Consolations for Mourners in Sion (1664). Her excellent article is titled "Restoration Declensions, Divine Consolations: The Work of John Foxe in 1664 Massachusetts," and can be found in The New England Quarterly, March 2007, Vol. 80, No. 1, Pages 35- 68. It is available online. She writes: "In 1664, a text appeared in New England that addressed itself to the uncertainty of the present by once again reaching back into the past--in this case, the past of over a century earlier--to let the dead speak. The anonymous tract, titled Divine Consolations for Mourners in Sion, published without an imprint, has survived in only two copies, one in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society and one at Trinity College in Dublin. Listed in the English Short-Title Catalog but never included in Evans's Early American Imprints, Divine Consolations has apparently gone entirely unnoticed in the history of Puritan scholarship. While the tract is clearly problematic in matters of attribution and publication, it also has much to offer us as we seek to understand the mentality of 1660s Massachusetts and the history of the book in early America. Comprised of a preface directed toward the people of Boston and New England, followed by an extract that reprints the section of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments related to the examination and letters of Marian martyr John Careless, combined with several letters from other Protestant martyrs, Divine Consolations is by far the first publication in America of any portion of the work best known as the Book of Martyrs; more than that, it seems to represent the first occasion on which material previously published in England--albeit an extract rather than a book proper--was printed in New England." In addition to building a convincing case for Scottow as "compiler" of the work, she also discusses his translations of Guy de Brès, the checkered career of Marmaduke Johnson, the micro-politics of 1660s Massachusetts, martyrology, and Quakerism. Highly recommended. Anne Myles http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scottow/7 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scottow/7 Thu, 17 May 2007 12:08:56 PDT In 1696 there appeared in Boston an anonymous 16mo volume of 56 pages containing four "epistles," written from 66 to 50 years earlier, illustrating the early history of the colony of Massachusetts Bay. The four "epistles" compiled in Massachusetts, or The First Planters were all originally addressed to English or European audiences: 1. The Humble Request of His Majesties Loyal Subjects (1630), sent from aboard the Arbella and usually attributed to John Winthrop, defended the emigrants' physical separation from England and reaffirmed their loyalty to the Crown and Church of England. 2. Thomas Dudley's letter "To the Right Honourable, My very good Lady, The Lady Bridget, Countess of Lincoln," written in March 1631, narrated the first year's experience of those "planters" who came over in Winthrop's fleet of 1630. It appeared in print for the first time in the Massachusetts compilation. 3. "The Preface of the Reverend Mr. John Allin, of Dedham, and of Mr. Thomas Shepard of Cambridge in New-England, before their Defence of the Answer made unto the Nine Questions" (from 1645) was taken from a longer work on church government, and it recounted the religious reasons for--and the providential design observable in--the great migration of the Independent or Congregational churches to New England. 4. "In Domini Nortoni Librum, ad Lectorem Præfatio Apologetica," by John Cotton, was the preface to a Latin treatise (Responsio ad Totam Quæstionum Syllogen à clarissimo Viro Domino Guilielmo Apollonio) by John Norton, published in 1648 to explain and defend the Congregational system of church government as practiced in New England. Cotton's preface again depicts the flight into exile not merely as a justifiable necessity for the continuance of the true Church, but as a stage in the history of redemption: "John ... was carried away into the wilderness that he might see more clearly not only the judgment of the great whore but also the coming down from heaven of the chaste bride of Christ, the new Jerusalem (Revelation 17:1, 3; 21:2)." An English translation of Cotton's Latin preface is supplied as an Appendix to this edition. The compilation and publication of this volume has long been attributed to Joshua Scottow, then a retired Boston merchant and antiquary who had recently published a history of those early years--A Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusets Colony Anno 1628 (1694)--that incorporated materials found in Dudley's previously unpublished letter. Whoever its compiler, the work is interesting for its astute selection of materials, all of which reaffirm Massachusetts' original religious and theocratic mission in the face of events of the 1690s which had cost the colony a great degree of its political autonomy and social consensus of purpose, i.e. the purification of the Christian churches. This online electronic edition includes the complete text of the 1696 printing. Some added notes identify people and references, situate the documents in their historical and disputational context, supply portions omitted by the original compiler, and discuss the textual history of the work and its component documents. John Winthrop