Sent “Without Ordre”: John Dunton, the London Book Trade, and the Provincialized Reader of Late Seventeenth-Century New England

Abstract This essay argues that a cohort of London booksellers who visited colonial New England fashioned readers as unsophisticated provincials. It focuses on the English bookseller John Dunton, who visited Boston in the 1680s. on marginalia in colonial books, and on the circumstances which undermined the publication of Magnalia Christi Americana.