![]() ![]() Metacomet’s forces attacked Lancaster on the morning of February 11, 1675, killing thirteen people, including Rowlandson’s sister and her sister’s children, as well as her brother-in-law. The conflict that followed for the next three years is remembered by Anglo-American historians as “Prince Philip’s War,” because “Philip” was the name that the English used for Metacomet. In 1675, the native American leader Metacomet, head of the Wampanoag confederation of tribes, led a series of attacks on English settlements. She married Joseph Rowlandson, a minister, in the 1650s, and they moved to Lancaster, in central Massachusetts, which was then essentially frontier territory for the English colonial settlers. Rowlandson was born Mary White in England in around 1637, and her family moved to the Massachusetts Bay Colony when she was in her early teens. ![]() Her experience is compelling and she writes vividly about it. Rowlandson’s work taps into colonial fears about the indigenous population, Puritan conceptions of the relationship between the material world and the unseen world of the divine, and the perennial fears of all patriarchal cultures about women’s sexuality. The book was originally printed in 1682, first in Boston and then, quickly, in London as well, and was reprinted over and over again for the next century and more. Mary Rowlandson’s gripping account of her experience as a captive of native Americans was enormously popular in her own time and became widely influential as the paradigm for the “captivity narrative,” a genre that would have hundreds of examples over the next two centuries and would also help shape works like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
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