Suchergebnisse

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, Erik Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead, from Elizabethan England to the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Through prodigious research and careful analysis, he boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

Introduction: ways of dying, ways of living -- Old worlds of death -- First encounters -- Burial and disinterment in the Chesapeake -- Holy bones and beautiful deaths in New France -- Grave missions: Christianizing death in New England -- Across the waters: African American deathways -- Crossing boundaries, keeping faith: Jewish deathways -- Burial and condolence in the Seven Years' War -- Conclusion: ways of living, ways of dying

Ministers in England and New England diverged in their writings about lay sexual renunciation. In England, clerical writers were ambivalent about celibacy. In contrast, New England ministers uniformly opposed lay vows of celibacy. These differing responses resulted from both demographic and cultural factors. English ministers found it difficult to criticize celibacy when nearly 20 percent of some birth cohorts never married. In New England, on the other hand, only a tiny percentage of colonists never married, allowing ministers to condemn celibacy. Culturally, the patriarchal family figured more prominently in New England ministers'minds as the foundation of a well-ordered society. Celibacy, then, was a direct attack on the institution that secured religion and promoted social stability. This article helps explain both the virulent attacks on Immortalists and Shakers in New England and the relative lack of controversy that greeted England's few religious celibates.

What role did sexual assault play in the conquest of America? How did American attitudes toward female sexuality evolve, and how was sexuality regulated in the early Republic? Sex and sexuality have always been the subject of much attention, both scholarly and popular. Yet, accounts of the early years of the United States tend to overlook the importance of their influence on the shaping of American culture. Sex and Sexuality in Early America addresses this neglected topic with original research covering a wide spectrum, from sexual behavior to sexual perceptions and imagery. Focusing on the period between the initial contact of Europeans and Native Americans up to 1800, the essays encompass all of colonial North America, including the Caribbean and Spanish territories. Challenging previous assumptions, these essays address such topics as rape as a tool of conquest; perceptions and responses to Native American sexuality; fornication, bastardy, celibacy, and religion in colonial New England; gendered speech in captivity narratives; representations of masculinity in eighteenth- century seduction tales, the sexual cosmos of a southern planter, and sexual transgression and madness in early American fiction. The contributors include Stephanie Wood, Gordon Sayre, Steven Neuwirth, Else L. Hambleton, Erik R. Seeman, Richard Godbeer, Trevor Burnard, Natalie A. Zacek, Wayne Bodle, Heather Smyth, Rodney Hessinger, and Karen A. Weyler