ABSTRACT
The dominant Puritan typification of captivity gained its influence from both social and cultural sources. Outside of Puritan New England, two narratives by Quakers had already wrought significant changes upon the providential interpretation of captivity. Both Jonathan Dickinson's narrative and the other Quaker narrative, by Elizabeth Hanson, portray providential deliverances from captivity; but neither reads captivity as a divine punishment, offers a typological interpretation of events, or presents Indians as essentialized typifications. All the narratives temper providential hermeneutics with a more secular mode of interpretation that might be called proto-ethnographic. The chapter traces the initial stages of the transition from a premodern interpretation of captivity grounded in the epistemology of correspondences to a recognizably modern one grounded in an increasingly secular empiricism. From 1699 until the end of the colonial era, Philadelphia rivaled Boston as a site for the production of captivity narratives.
