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\"New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (1620-1700),\" a prodigal exhibition of 504 objects culled from 130 museums, historical societies, and private collections, on view at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts through August 22, scotches three prevailing myths: those of the Gloomy Puritan, the Poor Indian, and Colonial Simplicity. The bluenosed Puritan is revealed as a sophisticated and intelligent consumer and patron of art. The Indian is no longer the inert captive of history, the helpless victim of white expansionism and smallpox. Instead, this exhibition argues, the Algonkians underwent a remarkable development with the acquisition of English technologies that permitted native artists to create masterworks impossible to fabricate before the first contacts with Europeans. Finally, our understanding of the seventeenth century itself undergoes revision. Not all New Englanders spurned Indians, however. Some of the most fascinating of the Indian artifacts shown at the MFA were brought back, probably as souvenirs, by the relatives and friends of Eunice Williams. In the raid on Deerfield in 1704, during the French and Indian Wars, the Caughnawaga Mohawks of Quebec province took captive the town's minister, the Reverend John Williams, and his daughter Eunice. The father was ransomed, but the daughter married a Caugh- nawaga warrior, converted to Catholicism, and espoused the French cause. As late as 1740 horrified relatives were still imploring her to return, but her rejection of her father's lifestyle, New England, and the Deerfield emissaries who repeatedly visited the Caughnawaga village was complete. Total war undertaken in the name of religious redemption represents one aspect of the Puritan character; the intellectual life of the seventeenth century represents another. Three-quarters of the settlers in New England were literate. The poet Anne Bradstreet documented incidents of everyday existence - the sickness of a child, her pregnancies, the burning of her house in Andover - in the extraordinary volume The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650). John Foster, the first printer in Boston, was also the first to publish an illustration of the Copernican solar system in New England. And right up through the years of Robert Frost's boyhood, the twenty-four small woodcuts of the New England Primer, first published before 1690, taught American children their ABCs.