An online search confirms that missionary societies—indeed, some of the groups Laura Stevens writes about in her informative study—are alive and well. For example, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the updated incarnation of the organization founded in 1698 by the Anglican priest Thomas Bray, from which in 1709 the Presbyterian Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge was created. One can easily download SPCK's "Trustees' Report and Accounts for the year ended 30 April 2008" and learn that it has a staff of 28 and 308 members (down from 317 in 2007), boasts the Queen as its patron, and operated in the black for the first time since 1980. In the spirit of its 18^th century Scottish wing—which produced, among other important texts discussed by Stevens, David Brainerd's famous journal of his missionary work with the Stockbridge and Delaware Indians, Eleazar Wheelock's Narratives of the Indian Charity-School (1766-75), and Samson Occom's A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772), the first English publication written by an American Indian—its current publishing wing earned a whopping £250,000 in the month of January alone, indicating the continued health of its textual outreach,

   Stevens's study of missionary literature in English written between 1642 and 1776 resonates strongly for contemporary transatlantic studies. It has much to tell us about that potent oxymoron, the Christian conquest of North America, as well as about the ongoing imperialism of Britain and the US. It is one of an impressive group of critical interventions that, in arguing for the importance of Native American Studies, has changed the face of American Studies. Books like Gordon Sayre's Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (1997), Hillary Wyss's Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (2000), Kristina Bross's Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (2004), and editorial projects including Michael Clark's The Eliot Tracks (2003) and Joanna Brooks's The Collected Writings of Samson Occom (2006) have begun to recover Indian presence and agency in the textual productions of the colonial period, forcing us to reconceptualize settler subjectivity as triangulated between native presence and metropolitan European absence. Stevens comes at this issue by studying the effects of religion in British writing about Indians, which, not surprisingly, tells us little about real Indians and almost more than we want to know about British missionaries in North America, their sponsoring organizations and supporters back home, as well as the cozy alliance of benevolence and business, and the historiography of emotion in the long eighteenth century.

   Through careful scholarship and deft close readings, Stevens makes a strong case for the importance of missionary writing to literary and cultural history, analyzing the genres and biblical tropes this writing draws on and the secular, often Romantic genres it sometimes surprisingly shaped. Her first move is to turn our attention away from the trendy notion of “sympathy,” which connotes “an imagined or authentic experience of shared feelings,” to “pity,” from the Latin word pius, which means duty, “the mercy born of religious devotion” (8). Pity often describes an imbalance of power, and like "compassion"—"to suffer with," "suggests imagined identification but not sameness" (8). Both terms combine effectively with Christian benevolence and discursive devices of visuality to produce the powerful "evangelical fantasy of making the other spiritually similar" that drives missionary writing (12). Chapter One explores how a range of missionary writing deploys the controlling tropes of "husbandry"—in the broader sense of domestic economy—and trade to characterize pity as a valuable import to the natives of the New World, in exchange, of course, for land and raw materials.  The same self-serving calculus emerges from the realization that the words "mercy" and "commerce" have the same root.

   Missionary activity spawned a series of "sympathetic networks" spanning the Atlantic, whose study expands the contours of our growing knowledge of the history of emotions. Epistolarity, as Chapter Two argues, was and remains a powerful tool for fundraisers of any stripe because letters move easily between the public and private spheres, their intimacy and direct address connecting individuals with far-flung communities and their causes. By the 18^th century, as Chapter Three demonstrates, two missionary societies in England and Scotland organized and centralized the exportation of British benevolence to beleaguered natives, their rhetoric prefiguring a "religious template for what would become a secular model of imperial sentiment constructed as emotional involvement" (31). An important feature of this rhetoric and the structure of feelings it appealed to is the complex negotiation of virtue and its performance across a minefield of contradictions, hypocrisies, and denials. Chapter Four investigates the debates that erupted between missionaries and their critics about the ethical value of feeling. Deists, for example, argued that evangelical Christians first excluded Indians from divine salvation on the basis of their savagery in order to pity them enough to attempt to convert them. What emerges from these chapters is a compelling case for the instrumentality of the figure of the Indian in Protestant thinking.

   Stevens's reading in Chapter Five of the biographies of two famous missionaries, David Brainerd and John Sargeant, by two important colonial figures, Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins respectively, clinches this argument. Stevens is at her best when adducing the generic forebears of missionary literature and comparing original diaries and letters by missionaries and the redaction of their lives and activities by their biographers. For example, she shows how Edwards heightens "Brainerd's tendency to displace external goals with internal ones" by alternating descriptions of action and emotion (144). Not only does this invoke "a community through a collective act of voyeurism" (147) and consumerism in "a religious paradigm that ostensibly refuted consumer desires" (159), but it erases the subjectivity of Indians in favor of the self-effacing spirituality of the solitary British missionary. Sensitive to subtle shifts in address, Stevens counters Hillary Wyss's argument that Sargeant's writings cast his mission as a captivity by distinguishing his texts from their ideological framing in Hopkins's biography, from which she delineates an apostolic model that emphasizes conscious and willing sacrifice. Taken together, these two biographies suggest the contribution of missionary literature to "the epistemological project of charting a self and pondering its connections to other selves" (158).

   The payoff of the book is the last chapter, an account of "The Christian Origins of the Vanishing Indian," in which Stevens attempts to give the well-documented discursive trope, first articulated by Lora Romero, a foreground in Protestant structures of emotional appeal. "Only missionaries," she concludes, "could have taught us to read Indian death as a sign of the benevolent cultivation of America" (164), a cultivation, she proposes, that shaped sentimental literature, Jacksonian policy, and even recent environmental politics (161). This chapter includes a somewhat cagey reading of Occom's Sermon, as compared to the ballad on an anonymous broadside appearing in Boston and Newport that turned it from a canny, double-voiced resistance to the trope of the vanishing Indian into a merely "sentimental meditation on Indian depravity" (176). I do not have room to rehearse Stevens' comprehensive arguments in favor of the pervasive influence, not so much of missionary writing as of its ways of thinking about otherness, except to say that they are compelling and provocative. Still, they left me wondering about the different dynamics of address in encounter literature, such as Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (1637) or Roger Williams's A Key Into the Language of America (1640), which do not seek the coercion and conversion of the native peoples they describe, or in writers such as Emerson who opposed Indian removal during the Jacksonian era, or even in missionary writings by the Spanish, French and Portuguese in the colonial era.

   For all that there is to admire in this study, and I hope I have enumerated how much that is, I was left with a feeling that some punches had been pulled. Stevens' study has been hailed for offering evidence from the missionary canon that we need to push back the advent of the Age of Sensibility, which historians set around the 1740s. But Julie Ellison's influential study of 1999, Cato's Tears, makes this argument forcefully and, in addition, discusses an aspect of this earlier literature of sensibility that, in relation to the missionary canon, Stevens only glosses—namely, the overwhelming masculinity of the writers and writing. In her Introduction, Stevens explains the triangulated desires of "colonial missionaries, their metropolitan readers and the Indians they were trying to save" in terms of Eve Sedgwick's Girardian erotic triangles of male homosociality (15), but never follows up on this insight. Early missionaries were all men; missionary societies explicitly excluded women until the reform movements of the nineteenth century: we are in the belly of the privileged white male Protestant beast, but nothing more is made of these gendered erotics than a passing mention. This omission or lost opportunity is related to another, namely Stevens's refusal to identify the coercive, arrogant superiority of missionaries as ethnocentrism or racism, two words that never appear in the book. She is careful to protect "the authentic religious concern that permeated many missionary texts" from "our own post-imperial guilt" which we attempt to assuage by "our condemnation of the past" (179). It is sometimes hard to recover what is authentic from among the posturing and performance of virtue and benevolence in these texts, but it is also important to accurately label and even condemn ethnocentrism when we meet it. Not to look squarely at it allows us to forget the assumptions behind all missionary work. Thus, Stevens begins her chapter on Brainerd's and Sargeant's biographies: "One of the ironies of early British missionary writings is that the priority of eliciting readers' pity for Indians and closeness with distant missionaries resulted in some erasure of missionaries. This erasure is distinct from that of the Indians, who are vividly portrayed within the texts but who often are more present as stereotypes than as real people. Missionaries, on the other hand, are not portrayed or depicted for readers. Rather, they are presented as extensions of their readers' perception…More lenses than objects of a gaze, missionaries often remain unknown within their own writings, while they and their readers observe Indians" (138). But in "observing Indians," missionaries and the readers who see through them, perceive only "stereotypes," perceive, in fact, what they want to see: "the poor Indians" who must be lost in order to be found. Shouldn't we be interested in how presumptions of superiority, ethnocentrism and even racism, shape perception and, if we accept Stevens's larger claims, have bequeathed a tunnel-vision, an imperial attitude towards otherness, a "tender" violence (we have the truth, you don't, but we are nice enough to share it with you so that you can be just like us) that continues to infect the thinking of those who promulgate simplistic binaries of good versus evil?