In Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery: Narratives of Encounter, Michael Householder wants to move the discussion of writings about the encounter between European and Native American cultures past the point that every European text is first and foremost an act of colonization. Householder recognizes colonization as a main intention behind early modern narratives of encounter. At the same time, he wants readers to see that in most European narratives of American encounter, attempted colonial controls in the writings have disruptions built into them, making the texts unstable as purely colonizing acts. These disruptions give the Native Americans being written about power and agency in creating the relationship between themselves and the Europeans being encountered. Though there are problems with his presentation, Householder is part of an important movement toward seeing the full complexity within writings about the earliest European-American encounters — that they are not simply reflections of European desires for control over new worlds.

Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery covers a wide range of primary materials. Householder reaches back to the fourteenth-century Book of John Mandeville as a pre-American example displaying the ruptures built into telling about another culture. Mandeville’s scene of the Islamic Sultan of the Saracens lecturing him about the sins of Christians serves as something of a prototype. The sultan’s lecture disrupts Mandeville’s narrative, changing Mandeville from an authoritative narrator on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to a reporter of much less unified experiences in traveling through the region. This shift from an authoritative European narrative to an unstable one in which the Other gains agency is at the heart of Householder’s analyses of texts about European encounters in the Americas. Discussed are Richard Eden’s translations of Sebastian Münster in A Treatyse of the Newe India (1553) and Pietro Martire d’Anghiera in The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India (1555); George Best’s 1570s accounts of Martin Frobisher’s searches for the Northwest Passage; three works about the 1580s Roanoke colonization efforts, Arthur Barlowe’s “Discourse of the First Voyage,” Thomas Hariot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, and especially Ralph Lane’s “Discourse on the First Colony”; John Smith’s various accounts of the Jamestown colony published between 1608 and 1624; and two different accounts of captivity and war in Massachusetts, John Underhill’s Newes from America (1638) and Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1678).

The breadth of Householder’s coverage is the work’s strength and the root of its weaknesses. As a strength, Householder shows that there are scenes of Native Americans disrupting European narratives of encounter, giving agency to the Native Americans portrayed alongside the European narrators. And Householder shows that there is not a single form for these disruptions, but that each one takes its narrative shape from the work’s specific historical and cultural contexts.

At the same time, to fit in as many works as he does, varied in time and form, Householder can only suggest the possibility of his thesis within each text, cherry-picking a few scenes from each. The overall argument is not made as definitively as Householder’s language implies. In addition, analyzing so many primary works, and including a great many theoretical works without particular focus on any one or two, makes the discussion hard to follow. Because relationships between various texts are complex, how they relate is not always clear. For example, at times in discussing John Smith’s narratives of the Jamestown colony, it is not certain whether the point being made is based on the 1608, 1612, or 1624 text, each of which has its own specific historical and bibliographic context. The proliferation of materials also leads to errors that, while not undercutting the overall point, can raise eyebrows. For instance, Householder asserts that the 1584 Amadas and Barlowe Roanoke expedition was sent to establish a colony, but “unable to find a suitable locale, they returned with a glowing report about the area’s general suitability” (113). The documents never say that Amadas and Barlowe were to establish a colony, and most scholars assume theirs was a scouting, not a colonizing, expedition. Smith’s 1608 A True Relation is also first identified in a list of works that Smith wrote after returning to England (143), when this work was in fact written in Virginia and published while Smith was still there. These are small errors, but they add up in readers’ minds.

Householder has a valid idea, one well worth pursuing. It would be good to see him revisit these questions, even these same texts, but to pick a few of them at a time to be able to give each one more focus as well as clearer and fuller presentations of their historical and bibliographic contexts.