This talk examined one of the more prolific periods of missionary linguistics in seventeenth-century North America. Professor Rivett argued that the practice of missionary linguistics arises out of a fragmented theological and philosophical context in which transatlantic ideas about language splintered into a variety of mystical ideas and proto-Enlightenment notions of a separation between human words and divine knowledge. Missionary encounters in the New World became language laboratories of a sort, where we see the confluence of epistemic ruptures engendered by these disparate ideas about the significance of words, particularly in the work of John Eliot and Chrétien Le Clercq.