Decoding Roger Williams

Near the end of his life, Roger Williams, Rhode Island founder and father of American religious freedom, scrawled an encrypted essay in the margins of a colonial-era book. For more than 300 years those shorthand notes remained indecipherable......until a team of Brown University undergraduates led by Lucas Mason-Brown cracked WilliamsOCO code after the marginalia languished for over a century in the archives of the John Carter Brown Library. At the time of WilliamsOCO writing, a trans-Atlantic debate on infant versus believerOCOs baptism had taken shape that included London Baptist minister John Norcott and the famous Puritan OC Apostle to the Indians, OCO John Eliot. Amazingly, WilliamsOCO code contained a previously undiscovered essay, which was a point-by-point refutation of EliotOCOs book supporting infant baptism.History professors Linford D. Fisher and J. Stanley Lemons immediately recognized the importance of what turned out to be theologian Roger WilliamsOCO final treatise. "Decoding Roger Williams" reveals for the first time WilliamsOCO translated and annotated essay, along with a critical essay by Fisher, Lemons, and Mason-Brown and reprints of the original Norcott and Eliot tracts."