"Rowlandson is a highly trained reader"

      Michael "Warner locates the intellectual origins of the regime of critical reading in the holistic biblical analysis of Locke and Spinoza, and he contrasts it with a religious regime exemplified by a reading of the scriptures by Mary Rowlandson, who was held captive by Indigenous Americans in 1676 and who took certain passages in Jeremiah to refer directly to the promise of salvation from her own captivity.  Rowlandson is precisely the sort of reader against whom Locke's analytic schema was directed:  unintersted in the philological resources of 'analytic collation, linguistic comparison, contextual framing, or any other effort at detachment from the rhetoric of address' (31), she reads the biblical text on the assumption that it 'is everywhere uniformly addressed by God, in the vernacular, to the believer (31).  She takes alighting on passages by chance to be a form of providential direction, but this is not a passive mode of reading; to the contrary, 'it requires repetition, incorporation, and affective regulation' (31), and it is supported by an extensive theological apparatus and extensive instruction in devotional manuals on the correct application of scripture.  Mary Rowlandson is a highly trained reader:  the regime that shapes her reading, with its focus on 'the elemental dyad of God and the soul as the situation of address' (31), is a rival framework to that of critical reading:  not pretheoretical, strongly reflexive in its own way, but directed to different ends and with quite a different understanding of how a text addresses a reader and of how intention is to be imputed to it."

     John Frow, On interpretive conflict (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 2019), 33-34.