Toc for Early American Studies Vol. 17.4 Fall 2019

H-AmRel ToC for Early American Studies Vol. 17.4 Fall 2019

Discussion published by Paul Chase on Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Following is the Table of Contents for the latest issue of

Early American Studies Vol. 17.4 Fall 2019

Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press

"Ineradicably Untidy": Women and Religion in the Age of Atlantic Empires Nicole Eustace, Ann M. Little

Mary Maples Dunn (1931–2017) transformed early American religious history in 1978 with unapologetic matter-of-factness, urging scholars to devote serious attention to the question of why women throughout American history participated in religious life in greater numbers than men did, even though they usually enjoyed far less formal power in churches. Some forty years earlier, in 1937, Edmund Morgan had responded to the tercentenary of the founding of Massachusetts with an article decrying the errors of three female biographers of Anne Hutchinson who dared to portray her as the "mother of the twentieth-century woman." In that essay, Morgan argued that the Hutchinson trial resulted from nothing other than a uniquely seventeenth-century doctrinal dispute that Hutchinson rightly lost on principle. In her article "Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period," Dunn placed Hutchinson's status as a woman back at the center of analysis, using her trial as a starting point for describing the different paths that women's potential for prophecy and leadership took in two seventeenth-century Protestant denominations and two different regions in colonial British America.

"Women of Our Nation": Gender and Christian Indian Communities in the United States and Mexico, 1753–1837 Jessica Criales

This article compares the experiences of indigenous women in Christian Indian communities across Mexico and the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing primarily on convents for indigenous nuns in Mexico and two Christian Indian tribes, Brothertown and Stockbridge, in the United States, it argues that women in Christian Indian communities leveraged the dual nature of their identities—as both indigenous and Christian—in order to gain recognition, authority, and autonomy within and beyond their communities. By becoming abbesses, schoolteachers, or simply "exemplary Christians," these women gained influence over colonial and national authorities on the basis of their Christian identity, while advocating for indigenous people and strengthening indigenous networks. They adapted to changing economic conditions and used creative strategies for fund-raising, thereby ensuring the financial stability of their communities. They also asserted new understandings of the relationship between ethnic identity and allegiance that diverged from the perspectives of colonial and national officials, as well as indigenous men. These broad similarities in indigenous women's responses to colonial and imperial rule in multiple

"Mother of all the living": Motherhood, Religion, and Political Culture at the Ojibwe Village of Fond du Lac, 1835–1839 Catherine J. Denial

Catharine Ely, daughter of a French father and Ojibwe mother, moved to the Ojibwe Village of Fond du Lac (currently Duluth, Minnesota) with her Anglo-American missionary husband, Edmund, in 1835. Having spent ten of her eighteen years boarding at a mission school, Catharine had adopted the domestic ideals and parental principles of American evangelical Protestantism; her approach to mothering, captured by her diary, was quite different from that of the local Ojibwe women. By exploring the contrasting cultural understandings of motherhood present in each community, we glimpse a new facet of the resistance Ojibwe people offered to Edmund and Catharine's plans for their conversion, and to the United States' larger colonial venture in the Upper Midwest.

Motherhood on a Mission: Missionaries, "Heathens," and the Maternal Ideal in the Early American Republic Cassandra N. Berman

This essay examines motherhood in the context of the United States' first foreign missionary movement. In the early nineteenth century, as the first generation of missionaries departed for foreign locations—including India, Burma, and the Sandwich Islands—concern began to mount over the behavior of foreign mothers who were neither white nor Christian. In popular texts, such women were frequently depicted as harmful mothers who abused, neglected, or killed their own children, and their conversion to Christianity was touted as the only path toward their reformation. This trope of the purportedly harmful, "heathen" mother served as powerful motivation for American women who hoped to evangelize overseas by marrying missionaries. In joining missions, they planned to convert foreign women, transform family and gender relations, and protect supposedly vulnerable children. Yet as their own writing frequently revealed, missionary wives themselves largely failed to conform to the rigorous strictures of early republican maternity. Using the edited and published memoirs of missionary wives as a lens, I argue that maternity served a far more complex role in American public life than has previously been acknowledged.

"To have a gradual weaning & be ready & wiling to resign all": Maternity, Piety, and Pain among Quaker Women of the Early Mid-Atlantic Janet Moore Lindman

Interactions among the spiritual, emotional, and corporeal were significant factors in the history of white women, childbirth, and child death in the early American republic. Though the social, cultural, and medical meanings of parturiency and motherhood have been studied by historians of early America, the spiritual aspects of reproduction have largely been ignored. Female Friends infused childbearing with religious meaning to contain its accompanying pain and fear as well as to express its joy and pleasure. This form of childbirth incorporated the mind and body into a spirituality built on obedience, modesty, perseverance, and discipline. The succession of pregnancy, delivery, nursing, child rearing, and sickness (both related and unrelated to reproduction) in a Quaker woman's life

Citation: Paul Chase. ToC for Early American Studies Vol. 17.4 Fall 2019. H-AmRel. 10-23-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/15697/discussions/5139493/toc-early-american-studies-vol-174-fall-2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-AmRel induced not only physical frailty but also spiritual reflection. Pregnancy and childbirth raised the possibility of an early death at the same time they afforded women the means to interact with God and to ask for his mercy and support. Piety channeled the existential and emotional dilemmas posed by pregnancy, childbirth, and child loss. By surveying the religious significance of bodies, pain, and emotion among early American Friends, this essay contends that the experiential aspects of Quaker motherhood were thoroughly steeped in spirituality.

Mounting the Poyto: An Image of Afro-Catholic Submission in the Mystical Visions of Colonial Peru's Úrsula de Jesús Rachel Spaulding

This essay considers how Africans and their descendants may have expressed their socioreligious identities within the early modern Iberian Catholic world. The author argues that the seventeenth- century Afro-Peruvian mystic Úrsula de Jesús situates herself within both Catholic and Yorùbá orishá religious practice. In a close reading of Úrsula's spiritual diary entries, the author speculates that Úrsula intentionally inflects the meanings of the words poyto to signify a Poitou mule and pollino to refer to a little donkey. In doing so, Úrsula reframes an image of mounting that may be read concurrently as a transformed representation of Catholic submission and as an image of Yorùbá ritual spirit possession. Within the transculturated religious space of colonial Lima, the author suggests that Úrsula rearticulates Catholic rhetoric to reframe her Afro-religious practice and perform the role of a spiritual authority. The essay explores how Úrsula de Jesús would have transposed an African past into her religious expression in her Catholic convent to encounter both mystic visions and orishá spiritual possession in a unified religious experience.

Black Women, Eldership, and Communities of Care in the Nineteenth-Century North Frederick Knight

This essay compares the spiritual and material terms of aging among black women in the post- emancipation North. It contrasts the public representations of African American women elders and the more prosaic, material work that black women and broader northern free black communities performed in coping with the challenges of aging. Early American biographies of black women elders characterized them as pious exemplars of Christian virtue. They also showed how they used collective practices to cope with aging. Other sources reveal this communal ethos. The records of churches, mutual aid societies, black women authors, and others show how free black communities brought together religious and material resources to support African American women in the aging process. Through this "community of care," black Northerners provided material and spiritual support to an aging population of women.

Finding Diana in the Purrysburg Mission Diary, 1739 Mark J. Dixon

This article presents an excerpt from a journal kept by Moravian missionaries in the course of their mission to enslaved Africans and African Americans in South Carolina in the 1730s. This resource is offered as a representative example of the kind of material preserved in the Moravian Church archives, whose primary location is in Herrnhut, Germany. The remoteness of this collection and the archaic eighteenth-century alphabet used by the original record keepers make these documents

Citation: Paul Chase. ToC for Early American Studies Vol. 17.4 Fall 2019. H-AmRel. 10-23-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/15697/discussions/5139493/toc-early-american-studies-vol-174-fall-2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-AmRel relatively inaccessible for early American historians. This is unfortunate, as there is abundant material of surprising value for scholars interested in the histories of slavery, race, religion, and gender. The figure of Diana is highlighted as a special example. As scholars such as Patricia Morton and more recently Marisa J. Fuentes have highlighted, it is particularly challenging to locate the lives of enslaved women in the archives. Whereas historians like Fuentes have made brilliant use of thin and often impersonal information to reconstruct those lives, the interests of the Moravian missionaries resulted in their journals and correspondence containing unusually personal information about the individuals they encountered, like Diana.

Neo-Solomonic Palladianism: Touro Synagogue and Its Women's Balcony, Newport, Rhode Island Catherine W. Zipf

Touro Synagogue stands as a statement of deeply held beliefs in a modern interpretation of Jewish principles and in the importance of classical architecture. The design's incorporation of both neo- Solomonic themes and Palladian principles placed it on the cutting edge of synagogue design in the Atlantic world. While seemingly separate, these two systems converge symbolically in the synagogue's women's balcony. Following contemporary neo-Solomonic principles, the balcony was a key component in the creation of numerological relationships among the parts of the building. At the same time, it also established architectural balance within the progression of Palladian elements. As a pivotal space in both theories, the women's balcony inserted women into the process of Judaic worship in a way that reflected the values of open-mindedness and inclusion inherent in Newport's Jewish community. It also placed them at the heart of two larger dialogues, one about the role of women within Judaic practice and one involving the relationship between the Newport congregation and the Atlantic world.

Hot over a Collar: Religious Authority and Sartorial Politics in the Early National Ohio Valley Mitchell Edward Oxford

In 1829 Mother Catherine Spalding of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Kentucky, allowed her community of Catholic women religious to wear a white collar as a part of their habit. The decision provoked a brief but passionate dispute between Spalding and her local bishop, Benedict Joseph Flaget of nearby Bardstown, Kentucky. Bishop Flaget feared the seemingly anodyne garment revealed Spalding's vanity and unruliness. Spalding insisted on her obedience to proper religious authority, but she nonetheless defended her conduct and the collar's merits. Her spirited defense of the collar shows that a skillful mother superior could marshal the gendered language of authority and propriety to her order's advantage. Moreover, the contest between Spalding and Flaget demonstrates that as Catholics sought to define their presence in the early United States, influential women religious like Spalding emerged as the "public face" of nineteenth-century American Catholicism.

REMEMBRANCES OF MARY MAPLES DUNN

Richard S. Dunn Susan E. Klepp Drew Gilpin Faust

Linda K. Kerber Mary Beth Norton Mary C. Kelley, Nancy J. Vickers

Submitted by Paul Chase, journals.pennpress.org