eBook

Faithful Bodies

Kopelson, Heather Miyano

2014

Overview

In the seventeenth-century English Atlantic, religious beliefs and practices played a central role in creating racial identity. English Protestantism provided a vocabulary and structure to describe and maintain boundaries between insider and outsider. In this path-breaking study, Heather Miyano Kopelson peels back the layers of conflicting definitions of bodies and competing practices of faith in the puritan Atlantic, demonstrating how the categories of white, black, and Indian developed alongside religious boundaries between Christian and heathen and between Catholic and Protestant.Faithful Bodiesfocuses on three communities of Protestant dissent in the Atlantic World: Bermuda, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In this puritan Atlantic, religion determined insider and outsider status: at times Africans and Natives could belong as long as they embraced the Protestant faith, while Irish Catholics and English Quakers remained suspect. Colonists interactions with indigenous peoples of the Americas and with West Central Africans shaped their understandings of human difference and its acceptable boundaries. Prayer, religious instruction, sexual behavior, and other public and private acts became markers of whether or not blacks and Indians were sinning Christians or godless heathens. As slavery became law, transgressing people of color counted less and less as sinners in English puritans eyes, even as some of them made Christianity an integral part of their communities. As Kopelson shows, this transformation proceeded unevenly but inexorably during the long seventeenth century.

• Publisher: NYU Press,New York University Press
• Subject: 17th century / America / Bermuda Islands / Bermuda Islands - Race relations - Religious aspects - History - 17th century / Bermuda Islands -- History -- 17th century / Christian Life / Colonial Period (1600-1775) / Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775 / Colonies / Ethnicity / Ethnicity -- America -- Religious aspects -- History -- 17th century / Great Britain / Great Britain -- Colonies -- America -- History -- 17th century / HISTORY / Massachusetts / Massachusetts -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 / Massachusetts -- Race relations -- Religious aspects -- History -- 17th century / Protestantism / Protestantism -- Social aspects -- America -- History -- History -- 17th century / Puritans / Puritans -- America -- History -- 17th century / Race relations / RELIGION / Religious aspects / Rhode Island / Rhode Island -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 / Rhode Island -- Race relations -- Religious aspects -- History -- 17th century / Social aspects / United States
• ISBN: 1479805009, 9781479805006