Protestant Relics in Early America
Protestant Relics in Early America
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Abstract
Protestant Relics in Early America upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. It chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered on collecting the supernatural memory objects of their dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends from the 1740s to 1860s. These objects materialized the real physical presences God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth. American Protestants of nearly all denominations and all walks of life—including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, writers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people—sought embodied, supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites such as George Washington’s Mount Vernon, purchased relics from the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, postmortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the ordinary dead became Protestant relics. Protestant relic practices were so pervasive in early America that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women’s education to Protestant–Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in this life and afterlife. In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, the book demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather diminished embodied presence. Moreover, it reveals how the modern historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the early American Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down.
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Front Matter
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Introduction: The History and Presence of Protestant Relics
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1
From “Memorials and Signs” to “Art That Can Immortalize”: The Evangelical Enlightenment’s Influence on Real Presence in Protestant Relic Culture
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2
The “Precious Relict[s]” of George Whitefield: Collecting the Supernatural Memory Objects of a Dead Minister and the Spread of Masculine Mourning in Late Eighteenth-Century Evangelicalism
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3
The “Invaluable Relique[s]” of George Washington: Sensing the Heavenly Presence of America’s Savior and the Politics of Protestant Relics in the Early Republic
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4
“The Reign of Embroidered Mourning Pieces”: The Rise and Decline of Handmade Relics in Young Protestant Women’s Education and the “Feminization” of Mourning
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5
“A Sacred Relic Kept”: The Evangelical “Good Death” Experience and Protestant Relics in the Marketplace
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6
“Protestant Evidence on the Subject of Relics”: Catholic Encounters with Protestant Relic Practices and the Christian Roots of American Civil Religion
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7
“I Was Not a Slave with These Pictured Memorials”: Supernatural Deathbed Experiences as Justifications for Slavery and the Work of Protestant Relics in Black Liberation
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Conclusion
The Deaths and Afterlives of Protestant Relics; Or Why Enlightened People Forgot the History and Presence of Protestant Relics
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End Matter
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