Faithful Bodies
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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.
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Early American Places is a collaborative project of the University of Georgia Press, New York University Press, Northern Illinois University Press, and the University of Nebraska Press. The series is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.earlyamericanplaces.org.
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11.2. “An Act for the Better Preventing of Spurious and Mixt Issue,” 1705, Massachusetts
The late seventeenth century was also a difficult time in the puritan Atlantic. In the years after the failure of the Protectorate and through the reign of George I, the aim of a pure Protestant community seemed under attack from every direction. The period after 1660 saw the increasingly strict enforcement of the decrees and practices of the Church of England on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and on the western side, the revocation of the Massachusetts Bay charter, the institution and downfall of the Dominion of New England, and heightened warfare with Algonquian peoples, including the extremely bloody King Philip’s War. With the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 ending the toleration of Protestants in France, it seemed as if Protestantism was in danger of being wiped from the face of the earth. In 1688 and 1689, royal officials’ attempts to hide the news that the Protestant William of Orange had taken over the English throne from the Catholic James II seemed to point to a Catholic conspiracy to put the colonies under the control of France and—by extension—the pope.34 For those who were convinced or hopeful that Protestant countries, especially England, were to take part in bringing about the new Jerusalem, the prospect of their apostasizing to Catholicism was seen as a portent of Satan’s imminent triumph.35
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