<i>The Legacy Book in America, 1664–1792</i> by Roxanne Harde and Lindsay Yakimyshyn

Around 1657, Anne Bradstreet put pen to paper and unknowingly began to write colonial British North America's first known “legacy book.” As she wrote, she thought about God, death, and her children. For eight years, Bradstreet added to her writings, using poems and letters to round out what scholars call her “legacy” work. The book that Bradstreet created for her children was as personal as it was performative. Anticipating her death, Bradstreet took inventory of her spiritual life and detailed her missteps as warnings for her children to heed. Bradstreet's children received her legacy texts after her death in 1672. Nearly two hundred years later, her texts were compiled into a published legacy book for the world to read.Anne Bradstreet did not invent the genre of the legacy text. Like many women of early New England, she carried the concept with her to the Americas. Legacy texts fall under the umbrella of the advice genre which was popular in early modern England. These texts were private writings, not intended for publication. Authors wrote with impending death in mind, hoping the work might act as a voice from beyond the grave. Despite their personal nature, legacy texts followed predictable patterns. The texts advocated for piety and conversion. Authors typically expressed “concern for their own sinfulness and spiritual condition” (17). Another reoccurring topic was the salvation of those around them. Children also created legacy texts. However, unlike adults’ legacies, dying children usually had their words transcribed by others.Scholars Roxanne Harde and Lindsay Yakimyshyn have compiled several of these early American “legacy books” into a curated collection that provides historical and cultural context for the genre and its popularity in colonial New England. A bibliography is included for further reference. The collection has seven chapters and is divided into two parts. Part one, “The Mother's Legacy,” includes five legacy books, each written by an early American mother. Part two, “The Child's Legacy,” includes two legacy books, each created from the dying testimony of an early American girl, one Quaker and one Puritan. A three-part appendix concludes the collection. While the published texts included in Appendix A, B, and C are not legacy books, they are within the spiritual narrative/advice genre and serve as supplemental companion pieces.Legacy books can be difficult source material for modern readers. These texts often contain both implicit and explicit references to religious concepts and scriptural references that non-specialists might miss. To remedy these interpretive challenges, each legacy book in the collection has detailed footnotes to explain ideas that might otherwise be overlooked. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction to the text, a biography of the author, and a summary of the publication history. Harde and Yakimyshyn's scholarship helps to demystify the texts for the reader and allows non-specialists of English literature to engage with the texts.Legacy books are compelling primary source materials, and they beckon for more study. They were also, as the editors note, a highly popular genre in early modern England and its North American colonies. Often, they were published to inspire Christian conversion or to yield a tidy profit. Harde and Yakimyshyn argue that “all of these writings give a personal perspective of the lives of colonial girls and women” (20). But, given the circumstances of their publications, historians might ask: Are these texts actually reflective of the people who allegedly wrote them? Or are they more reflective of the editors and compilers who benefited from their publication? These questions are particularly important to consider when analyzing legacy books purportedly crafted by younger authors. Children certainly could have created these materials. But children's words were transcribed by others, raising queries about the authenticity of their voices on the page. Can more be done to historically contextualize these texts? The texts focus exclusively on white women and girls in New England, before and after the American Revolution. The editors suggest that these writings speak broadly to the experiences of “colonial American women and girls” (9). Critical readers may want to know more about how various racial, religious, political, temporal, and geographic context shaped the genre.With additional context, the legacy books in Harde and Yakimyshyn's collection could be used in undergraduate history courses to explore early New England's culture. Reading against the grain and between the lines, legacy books offer subtle insight into how colonists made sense of spirituality and death, motherhood and family, gender roles, authority, literacy, agency, and the life stages of childhood and youth. For example, Sarah Goodhue's 1681 legacy book “bequeathed” several of her children to various relatives (144). Her choice of words hints at the need for deeper research into the subjects of maternal authority and children as legal property in colonial New England. That children's legacy books existed at all indicates that New Englanders recognized children's agency and authority in ways that are often overlooked by historians today. In short, Harde and Yakimyshyn's work invites readers to engage with texts as artifacts of evolving significance within Anglo-American culture.