Complete Writings of Roger Williams

Introduction to the Series

Shortly after the U.S. Civil War, a group of men in Providence, Rhode Island, calling themselves the Narragansett Club, determined to rescue the widely scattered literary remains of Roger Williams. The happy result of their efforts was the publication in six volumes (1866–1870) of the writings of Roger Williams. These gentlemen made no effort to present a modern text, but maintained the original orthography and Williams’s extravagant use of italic and parentheses. Fewer than two hundred cop- ies of this set were published.

By the second half of the twentieth century, these volumes were long out of print. Any volumes that happened to turn up were, moreover, prohibitively expensive. Under the stimulus of Harvard’s Professor Perry Miller, the decision was made to reprint these six volumes, along with a seventh that would include new material or items that the Narragansett Club chose not to reprint. Volume VII begins with an interpretive essay by Professor Miller who also provided invaluable introductions to each item in this new tome. The publishing house of Russell & Russell in 1963 published four hundred sets of this edition, entitled The Complete Writings of Roger Williams.

Now, in the early years of the twenty-first century this edition is likewise exhausted. The firm of Wipf & Stock, recognizing the need to keep Williams in print, has fortunately filled this vacuum. On a separate page in each book, one will find a listing of the contents of each of the seven volumes, and in Volume I a new introduction to the life and works of Roger Williams has been provided.

Edwin S. Gausted