Reviews
"This book is a compelling study of Episcopalian Christianity in early American slave societies. Beasley displays a deep understanding of the ways that Christian ritual practice shaped English belonging in early Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, showing how religion permeated even the most brutally materialistic of human societies."
—Vincent Brown, author of The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery
"Beasley’s view of the Atlantic brings not only institutional religion but also slavery and the plantation enterprise into sharp relief in different Atlantic sites...Taken together, Beasley’s work is an interesting and important contribution to the study of the religious cultures of the Atlantic World that will be useful both to scholars focused closely on the field and to those people interested more generally in the religions and cultures of the early Americas."
"In this terrifically astute study of Anglicanism in South Carolina, Barbados, and Jamaica, Nicholas M. Beasley brings ritual theory to bear on rich and rewarding sources . . . Beasley's most significant contribution is his reading liturgical culture through the lens of slavery. Beasley does not reduce religious practice in a crudely functionalist way, but he makes clear that elites' religious lives served their project of crafting a slave society."
—Journal of Anglican and Episcopal History
"Beasley has produced a remarkable new illustration of southern liturgical culture and its adaptability to cultural, societal, and racial transformations."
—Journal of Southern Religion
Description
Drawing on a mix of historical and anthropological methods, Beasley covers such topics as church architecture, pew seating customs, marriage, baptism, communion, and funerals. Colonists created an environment in sacred time and space that framed their rituals for maximum social impact, and they asserted privilege and power by privatizing some rituals and by meting out access to rituals to people of color. Throughout, Beasley is sensitive to how this culture of worship changed as each colony reacted to its own political, environmental, and demographic circumstances across time. Local factors influencing who partook in Christian rituals and how, when, and where these rituals took place could include the structure of the Anglican Church, which tended to be less hierarchical and centralized than at home in England; the level of tensions between Anglicans and Protestants; the persistence of African religious beliefs; and colonists’ attitudes toward free persons of color and elite slaves.
This book enriches an existing historiography that neglects the cultural power of liturgical Christianity in the early South and the British Caribbean and offers a new account of the translation of early modern English Christianity to early America.
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Cloth |
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Paper List price: $24.95 978-0-8203-3645-9 10/01/2010 |
Nicholas M. Beasley is rector of the Church of the Resurrection in Greenwood, South Carolina.
