Mary Rowlandson

Mary Rowlandson was a New England colonist captured with three of her children during a Nipmuc attack on Lancaster, Massachusetts, in King Philip’s War in 1676. She spent about eleven weeks among Indigenous groups before being ransomed and reunited with surviving members of her family.

Rowlandson later published an account of her captivity, usually known as The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, which became one of the best-known early works printed in colonial New England. Written through a strongly Puritan religious framework, it is both an important first-person source for the war and a text that must be read alongside Indigenous perspectives largely absent from her account.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Mayflower Papers includes selections from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation; Bradford and Edward Winslow’s Mourt’s Relation; Winslow’s Good News from New England; Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan; Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative; and Benjamin Church’s account of King Philip’s War.