Future History: Global Fantasies in Seventeenth-Century American and British Writings by Kristina Bross (review)

• Published in: Early American Literature Vol. 54; no. 2; pp. 591 - 595
• Main Author: Searle, Alison
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina Press 01.05.2019
• Subjects: 17th century; Archives & records; Brochures; Christianity; Dutch language; Editing; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Fate; Globalization; Historical text analysis; Interdisciplinary aspects; Literary history; Literary influences; Modern literature; Questioning; Religion; Religious conversion; Studies; Women; Writers; United Kingdom > UK; England
• ISSN: 0012-8163; 1534-147X; 1534-147X
• DOI: 10.1353/eal.2019.0053

If, as Bross notes, we juxtapose Jessey alongside the radical bookseller Hannah Allen and consider the conversion pamphlet in tandem with Jessey's published account of the prophet Sarah Wight, it is possible to attribute "more significance to the influence … of women," not least because the two texts "are at the intersection of the overlapping spheres of the minister and the bookseller" (103): "Exceeding Riches is an early and prominent example of Jessey's ecumenical willingness to understand voices coming from unlikely sources—including women, as prophetic, as harbingers of cosmic events" (104). [...]Bross argues that the event was resurrected in the 1650s and "used to create a united colonial map of proto-imperial England, a 'spatial fantasy' in which the nation's enemies [the Dutch] threatened England and Englishmen wherever in the world they were to be found" (124). The link between this medical handbook and the Amboyna incident exposes the structural violence that characterizes Bradwell's medical practice: the image of water torture leads him to invent a treatment that "perhaps 'improves' on the classical treatment of hydrophobia" (156). Bross's interdisciplinary interrogation of globalization, religion, book history, and commerce, alongside her theoretical exploration of an expanded concept of the archive, colonial fantasy, and "true relations," provides fresh insights into the archives and texts that underlie all scholarly attempts to write literary history and challenge us to rethink and restructure the ways we excavate, interpret, and tell such stories.