Study Guide Island Christianity
Table of Contents
Biblical Marginalia
In the margins and blank spaces of the surviving versions of John Eliot's Indian Bible, Wampanoags and other New England Algonquians wrote down commentaries, concerns, odd notes, and highlights of family histories. This practice was not unheard of in colonial New England: indeed one of great innovations of the Geneva Bible was that it provided a model for marginalia. The marginalia in Algonquian Bibles ranges from the mundane to the spiritually poignant: for some, the Bible represented a place to practice writing the alphabet or one's name. For others, it was a space to reflect upon the relationship between the text and the precarious state of one's soul. In one Eliot Bible from Chappaquiddick (now in a private collection), the margins became a space to mark the dates of the death of family members (Goddard & Bragdon, I.459 Translation of B47). In some of the most interesting cases, however, biblical marginalia can help us trace the life history of an individual bible as it moved through the hands of generations of worshippers, as in the case of one of an Eliot Bible originally used in Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard and now owned by the Library Company of Philadelphia.
The Gay Head Bible is particularly rich in the range and number of annotations. During the first decades of the eighteenth century this bible passed through the hands of Simon, Joseph (1712, 1729) and Moses Papenau, and in 1738 it was annotated by Zachary Hossueit, the minister at Gayhead. The Papenaus were members of Hossueit's congregation: the minister married Simon Papenau and Marcy Akoochik on November 13, 1750 (Marriage registry for the Gay Head Congregational Church, Huntington Library; Goddard & Bragdon 12:12-14). Hossueit was a leading figure on Martha's Vineyard and an accomplished bilingual: as historian David Silverman remarks, "For almost a half a century Hossueit was the Indians' unrivaled master of the written word, translating the passages of God's book into plain speech for the people and interpreting the natives language for colonial authority" (Silverman 274). This Bible is only one of several surviving Algonquian texts from Martha's Vineyard that bear Hossueit's mark.
Items Related to Biblical Marginalia in the Archive
Eliot Bible < Previous | Next > Psalms