CULTURAL READINGS: Colonization & Print in the Americas

Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania Library

Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God... Cambridge, Mass.: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson, 1663.

After printing the New Testament in Massachusett in 1661, John Eliot published the complete Bible in Massachusett two years later, in an edition of 1000, large by Cambridge standards. Eliot's Puritanism valued personal conversions through contact with God's Word; Puritan missionaries in New England decided to work toward teaching literacy in transliterated Indian languages, at least until all converts could be taught English. Eliot probably translated in close collaboration with native converts like Job Nesutan, although the title page does not give them credit. Three years after the Bible, Eliot attempted to compose a grammar of the same language.

John Eliot's Indian Grammar

Religion and Print

• Missionary Accounts
• [Return to] Missionaries and Indian Languages

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