Faithful Bodies

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 MiyanoKopelson 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 Bodies focuses 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.

Offers a new way to understand religion, politics, and identity in the English Atlantic World. . . . This is an ambitious undertaking, and Kopelson has done it justice. Faithful Bodies really does it all, with a provocative argument, careful archival research, creative historiographical connections, and evocative, accessible writing., This is a fascinating and important new perspective on the body of Christ in early America. With meticulous research and illuminating insight, Kopelson reveals the chain of associations that bound religious communities and colonial societies to an emerging Protestant ethos committed to defining and disciplining corporeal life. Finally, we have a satisfying account of the Puritan attitude to race and sex., The author of this study makes an important contribution to a growing conversation about race and religion in the puritan Atlantic world., Faithful Bodies offers a complex, nuanced, and rich description of the role that bodies played in shaping Atlantic-wide conversations about race and religion. . . . A remarkably erudite work of scholarship. . . . Richly detailed, intellectually sophisticated, and nuanced., One of the most compelling recent accounts of the complexity of difference in the Atlantic world. . . . While the book is filled with insights ranging from subtle readings of the spiritual meaning of fish and cassava to the regulation of interracial sex, Faithful Bodies stands out in both its extended attention to multiple communities and its broad archive. . . . Kopelson is not content to claim one methodological subfield, and thus readers will find themselves moving, expertly, from interpretations of material remains to a subtle reading of seventeenth-century invocations of the curse of Canaan. . . . In her attention to language and its implication in the material, social, and cultural worlds, she demonstrates that histories need to do more than adhere to disciplinary restrictions. To track differencesof race, of gender, of religionand thus to understand the modern subject is to move across the various registers of its constructionsomething Kopelson does better than most.

Heather Miyano Kopelson is Associate Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty in Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.