Running Head A micro-ebook reformatted from
Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations
Volume 1.2
DAVID MURRAY
Using Roger Williams’s
Key into America
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© Symbiosis 1997, 2007 all rights reserved
The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in SYMBIOSIS Volume 1.2 (October 1997) pp 237–254
2nd electronic edition published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks LLP
http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk
Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE
Essays published in Symbiosis are subsequently digitized
for the benefit of the author (80%) and the Journal (20%)
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ISSN: 1362-7902
A cumulative index of Symbiosis essays and reviews is online at
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David Murray
Using Roger Williams’s Key into America
Roger Williams is probably best known today for his distinctive role in early
American history as the champion of religious and civil freedoms, a man whose
opposition to the theocratic ambitions of the Puritans led to his exile to Rhode
Island, to live in close proximity to the Indians of the region. Here I concentrate on
one remarkable product of that exile, his A Key into the Language of America, or An
Help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New England.1
The larger context of this essay is a concern with the complex of ideas and activities
represented as exchange, conversion and translation between Indians and whites in
early contacts—not just what is being exchanged, but what is the rhetoric of
exchange itself—and Roger Williams’s peculiar situation, between white and Indian
societies makes him a particularly useful and intriguing figure. A shrewd trader,
committed to religious conversion and the values of Christianity and civilization,
Williams spared little sentiment on Indians, and was unrepentant about his indirect
role in the Pequot massacre, but he was translator and constant mediator for Indians,
and the author of one of the most remarkable and complex works about them
produced in early New England. It is this book, and how we are to read it, which is
the subject of this essay.
A Key was written literally between Europe and America, according to Williams,
on his sea voyage back to England, and designed for the information and use of the
English. As such it can be seen as intermediate between on the one hand the
tradition of voyages and visits to the New World, written retrospectively from
Europe, and on the other a classic American text of foundation, John Winthrop’s
‘Modell of Christian Charity’, written on the way to America. The explicit intention
was to aid practical communication with Indians, as well as giving information
1
The fullest scholarly edition is Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, ed. John J.
Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1973). References in this
essay are to the 1643 edition, facsimile reprint (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Gryphon Books, 1971).