Customer Reviews

The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier

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As an amateur historian, I found this book a carefully considered and refreshingly factual historical evaluation of an important topic in early American History. The author, a sophisticated prose stylist, writes in a muscular style that carries the reader with ease through the narrative. His wry turn of phrase belies his deep understanding of the complexities of this time period. I heartily recommend this book.

New England captivity narratives---accounts by those early Americans who had been captured by Indians or French raiders and later ransomed or escaped their captivity---have become recently popular among historians and literary studies scholars for the information they contain about gender. The prevailing image of the captive is that of a young woman. Several of these women remained with their captors despite the payment of ransom and the pressures of their families to return to America because they found in French Catholic Canada empowerment denied them in Puritan America. Despite the stereotype, Bill Foster has found that boys and men constituted more than 80% of those taken from 1675-1763. Bill's discovery and scholarship significantly and importantly opens up the gender discussion for early American history because these Puritan men found themselves working for and taking orders from French and former American Catholic women many of whom were quite young. This condition the men found shameful and degrading and only a handful became assimilated to the French Catholic culture. Those who returned frequently would not name their captor because of the shame of having been bossed by a woman. Bill's research in the archives in Canada and the U.S. sheds new light on these highly prejudiced male captivity narratives.

Well-researched, primary source for a nearly unknown niche of American history.
A thorough piece of historiography that is well-organized and easy enough to read so that it progresses more like a good story than an academic work.