SOURCE: “The Theology of History in Of Plymouth Plantation and Its Predecessors,” in Early American Literature, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 1975, pp. 47-66.

In the essay below, Hovey explores the theological themes of several early colonial histories in order to demonstrate how Bradford follows, adapts, or abandons those themes in his own history. Hovey considers Bradford's literary technique in addition to his theological concerns to explicate his developments in historiography.

When William Bradford in “about the year 1630”¹ began to write his full scale history of Plymouth Plantation, several carefully written historical relations of the first settlement in New England had already appeared in print. “A Brief Relation of the Discovery and Plantation of New England” (1622) covered the years of exploration from 1607 to the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620, “Mourt's Relation” (1622) continued the history to the autumn of 1621, and “Good News from New England” (1624) by Edward Winslow brought this three-part record...