Faithful Bodies : : Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic / / Heather Miyano Kopelson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Kopelson, Heather Miyano,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Early American Places ; 13
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Inthe seventeenth-century English Atlantic, religious beliefs and practicesplayed a central role in creating racial identity. English Protestantismprovided a vocabulary and structure to describe and maintain boundaries betweeninsider and outsider. In this path-breaking study, Heather MiyanoKopelson peels back the layers ofconflicting definitions of bodies and competing practices of faith in thepuritan 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 threecommunities of Protestant dissent in the Atlantic World: Bermuda,Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In this “puritan Atlantic,” religiondetermined insider and outsider status: at times Africans and Natives couldbelong as long as they embraced the Protestant faith, while Irish Catholics andEnglish Quakers remained suspect. Colonists’interactions with indigenous peoples of the Americas and with West CentralAfricans shaped their understandings of human difference and its acceptableboundaries. Prayer, religious instruction, sexual behavior, andother public and private acts became markers of whether or not blacks andIndians were sinning Christians or godless heathens. As slavery becamelaw, transgressing people of color counted less and less as sinners in Englishpuritans’ eyes, even as some of them made Christianity an integral part oftheir communities. As Kopelson shows, this transformation proceededunevenly but inexorably during the long seventeenth century.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I. Defining -- 1. “One Indian and a negroe, the first thes ilands ever had” -- 2. “Joyne interchangeably in a laborious bodily service” -- 3. “Ye are of one body and members one of another” -- Part II. Performing -- 4. “Extravasat blood” -- 5. “Makinge a tumult in the congregation” -- 6. “Those bloody people who did use most horrible crueltie” -- 7. “To bee among the praying Indians” -- 8. “In consideration for his raising her in the christian faith” -- Part III. Disciplining -- 9. “Abominable mixture and spurious issue” -- 10. “Sensured to be whipped uppon a lecture daie” -- 11. “If any white woman shall have a child by any negroe or other slave” -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author