The collected volume assembles papers that disentangle agency and voice and map approaches that include the silent, the inarticulate, the non-human, and the material. The five co-authored chapters offer a multiplicity of case studies that engage critically with claims for agency in early America, interrogating and probing methodologies of the material and tackling the ways in which worldviews, concepts, and analytic methods exerted agency in the past. Chapter case studies collectively reflect on the consequences of critical engagement within agency in American Aesop collections and mathematical primers, Joseph Mountain and Robert Wedderburn's life writing, early American archive work including censored sixteenth-century pirate narratives and letterbooks, and more. The conclusion expresses the strong belief that networked thinking and collaborative writing have the potential to resituate early American studies.

Ilka Brasch is Lecturer at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany.

Elena Furlanetto is Guest Professor of British Cultural Studies at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany.