| Overview | Seminars | Working Papers | Workshops |
| Newsletter | Other Resources | Photo Album | Site Map |
2000 Seminar Working Paper Abstracts
The following list of abstracts describes the papers presented at the 2000 meeting of the Atlantic History Seminar, "The Circulation of Ideas, 1500-1825." A copy of the program, where papers may be viewed in the context of the sessions, is also available, and links from each author's name on the program pages will return the reader to the appropriate abstract here.
Guillaume Aubert. "Colonial Mésalliances: The Metropolitan Roots of Racial Prejudice in the French Americas"
This paper proposes to analyze the circulation and transformation of the French metropolitan idea of mésalliance (marriages between people of different social ranks) in the contexts of New France, the French Caribbean, and French Louisiana during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the biological determinism stemming from early modern metropolitan discourses over the issue of mésalliance progressively found its way into French colonial discourses and policies regarding French-Indian and French-African sexual encounters. By the turn of the eighteenth century, French colonial leaders frustrated in their efforts to establish orderly colonies began progressively to equate corruption of the social order with corruption of 'blood' by drawing on the metropolitan idea of mésalliance. By the mid-eighteenth century, the language of race that had thus far been confined to the preservation of the purity of metropolitan aristocratic blood had been extended to the French colonial population at large. [WP # 00001]
Célia M. Azevedo. "The Ethiopian Redeemed and the Circulation of Antislavery Ideas."
My aim is to approach the issue of the circulation of emerging antislavery ideas on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth century. I shall analyze a book by the Portuguese priest Rocha, The Ethiopian Redeemed, pledged, nurtured, corrected, educated, and emancipated, which was published in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1758. Rocha contributed to the formation of an antislavery ideology by raising three points: the illegitimacy of the African slave trade; the ideal of preparing the slaves for freedom in order to convert them into sober, self-disciplined workers; the emancipation of the slave women's new-born. Similarities between Rocha's proposal and those of other abolitionists such as Granville Sharp, Baron of Bessner, and the Pennsylvania Quakers will be explored. [WP # 00031]
Scott Breuninger. " 'Westward the Course of Empire': The Translatio Tradition and Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Theories of Historical Development"
Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a subtle, but important, shift in theories of history evolved during extensive consideration of the bonds between England and the American colonies. One strand of this thought centered on explaining modern history though recourse to the ancient notion of a translatio imperii or studii: the belief that the seat of world "empire" or "civilization" has constantly migrated from East to West. In both its classical and Christian forms, the translatio argument had depended on a cyclic view of history, explaining the growth of states (and learning) as part of a natural cycle, often using the organic metaphor of birth, maturity, and old age. By tracing the evolution of this idea, this paper will, it is hoped, help illuminate the rhetorical choices available during this time and assist in broadening our understanding of a crucial step in the adaptation of classical historical conventions to the colonial case. [WP # 00022].
Christopher L. Brown. "The Ends of Innocence: Slavery, Politics, and the Idea of Moral Responsibility, 1764-1783"
Traditionally, historians have described the circulation of antislavery ideas in the British isles during the 1770s and 1780s as a consequence of conscious choice: antislavery began to matter because activists disseminated antislavery propaganda. Without minimizing the importance of the early abolitionists, this paper argues for a less voluntaristic, more serendipitous origin to British antislavery argument. Heightened concern with the moral character of Atlantic slavery was primarily an unintended consequence of the public debate on the American Revolution. Some British writers condemned American slavery to condemn American patriots seeking independence. Others denounced the British slave trade to question the virtues of imperial policy. In the process, both made slavery a political issue, exposing the plantation complex to greater scrutiny and casting opposition to slavery as a test of virtue. [WP # 00029]
Robert E. Brown. "Storks on the Moon and Other Invented Absurdities: Critical Historical Interpretation and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century American Religious Discourse"
Students of American history have long been aware of the impact of early modern intellectual developments on colonial religion. To date, however, the impact of critical historical thought on colonial biblical interpretation has been almost wholly ignored. The present study examines evidence for colonial literacy on such matters, particularly as it is found in the transatlantic print culture. It finds that by the first half of the eighteenth century American religionists were fully aware of the broad range of critical problems facing interpreters, such as determining a text's authorship and historical authenticity. This awareness provoked numerous responses orally and in print. Perhaps nowhere more significantly was such a response forthcoming than in the public discourse of Jonathan Edwards, colonial America's premier theologian and intellect. Edwards's literary remains are replete with considerations of critical issues, including his culminating treatise, the History of the Work of Redemption. [WP # 00020]
Nuran Çinlar. "Advice to Bachelors: Reading about Marriage in the Colonial Chesapeake"
In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, colonists debated two competing marriage ideals: the earlier adaptive ideal with its promise of freedom in matrimonial choice, and the newer, conservative "English" ideal, which promised parents control over their children's marriage choices and more security for their own accumulated wealth and status. This debate, traceable through the colonial press, resulted in the dominance of the "English" ideal and increasing marriage practice according to this ideal. Through choosing what items to circulate for colonists' consideration, the Chesapeake press contributed to a significant social and cultural shift at mid-century. [WP # 00007]
Michael F. Conlin. "Joseph Priestley's American Defense of Phlogiston Theory: The Political Dimension"
An examination of Joseph Priestley's repeated use of a metaphor likening the antiphlogistic theory to the French Revolution and likening his phlogiston theory to counter-revolutionary movements in his American defense of phlogiston sheds light on the dynamic between politics and science in the early American Republic. Although the link between the new chemistry and the French Republic had been made by other chemists, Priestley was unique in being the only phlogistian with republican sympathies who linked the Chemical Revolution with the French Revolution. Priestley's rhetoric was complicated by the fact that all of his disputants in the American phlogiston controversy were republicans. Priestley's unlikely associations of chemistry and politics seem to be the result of his political persecution by Federalists, his identification of the antiphlogistic chemistry with Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and his compatriots, his whimsical tone in scientific discourse, and his realization that Americans identified French science with radical politics. [WP # 00017]
Seth Cotlar. "Reading the Foreign News, Imagining an American Public Sphere: The Democratic-Republican Societies in Trans-Atlantic Context"
This paper examines the debate over the Democratic-Republican Societies in a transatlantic context. It explores how the societies' supporters and detractors used ideas and news from Europe to justify their positions. Rather than situating this debate in the context of a uniquely American historiography about the transformation of republicanism into liberalism, this essay treats the American developments of the 1790s as part of an Atlantic-wide rethinking of the doctrine of popular sovereignty that had legitimated the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The failure of American democrats to construct a thickly institutionalized public sphere which could mediate between "the people" and the "government" was not a pre-ordained development; rather, it was part of a broader, international reaction against the most radi-cally democratic implications of popular sovereignty. [WP # 00023]
James D. Delbourgo. "Perkins's Tractors and Trans-Atlantic Scientific Culture at the End of the Eighteenth Century"
This essay examines the career of Perkins's Tractors, a patented medical technology successfully marketed in both England and the United States in the years around 1800, as an episode in the cultural history of science and medicine. Perkinists exploited enlightened and democratic conceptions of useful knowledge and common sense, shared on both sides of the Atlantic, in order to avoid having to produce a satisfactory theory of how the Tractors worked. However, this lack of scientific authority ultimately allowed critics to undermine the Tractors' credibility, by representing their effects as the product of theatrical manipulations of the patient's imagination by quack doctors. [WP # 00018]
Nicholas Dew. "Atlantic Triangulation: The French Scientific Expedition to Gorée and the Antilles, 1681-1683"
In the 1670s and 1680s, the French Académie Royale des Sciences undertook an ambitious program to make a series of natural-philosophical observations in various parts of the world. This paper tells the story of a voyage made in 1681-83 by three envoys of the Académie—Varin, Deshayes, and de Glos—to the island of Gorée (off the coast of modern Senegal) and to Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean. The Gorée expedition can be taken as an example of the construction of a network of communication across the Atlantic space. By following the three envoys around their triangular voyage, we can uncover the practices that make possible the circulation of ideas. [WP #00019]
Elsa Dias. "America and Portugal: In Search of a Luso-American Political Tradition"
The paper discusses the effects of the American Revolution on Portugal. American political thought is discussed by presenting the roots, the evolution, and the effects. The paper is divided into three main categories. The first section, titled "The European Theorists and North America," presents an overview of Locke and Montesquieu. The second, "A Political Theory of Our Own," explains the development of American political thought, particularly the theme of revolution. Finally, "Exploring the Luso-American Tradition," identifies the influence of American political thought in various aspects of Portuguese political and social life. The paper's larger project is to identify Portugal as a major participant in this revolutionary epoch and as a player in the transatlantic world of the time. Indeed, Portugal was part of the philosophical and political world of the American revolutionary era. [WP # 00025]
Keila Grinberg. "Freedom Suits: Manumission and Civil Law in Brazil and the United States"
Between the early 1790s and the early 1820s, many slaves from cities such as New York, Baltimore, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador initiated lawsuits against their masters in which, for various reasons, they argued that they should be freed. Proceeding from an analysis of those freedom suits, this paper aims to discuss two interrelated themes: first, that common concepts of justice, freedom, and rights were shared by the urban slaves who sued their masters in the two countries; and, second, that Brazilian and North American lawyers both used Roman law concerning slavery to defend slaves, thereby creating new interpretations for ancient legislation. [WP # 00032]
Michael J. Guasco. "The Idea of Slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic World before 1619"
Decades before the development of race-based slave societies in Anglo-America, many English-men already possessed well-founded ideas about the nature and significance of human bondage. Some of these people were literate elites, familiar with authoritative texts, but an even larger group of Englishpeople developed a unique perspective on slavery based on their personal observations and human interactions throughout the Atlantic world. These tangible encounters provided the framework for the elaboration of popular ideas about slavery that were not necessarily delineated by either race or physical labor. Rather, slavery in the pre-plantation Anglo-Atlantic world also entailed questions of redemption, punishment, captivity, and potential death – all of which were particularly worrisome issues because the English themselves were as liable as any other group to be subjected to bondage. [WP # 00028]
Katherine Hermes. "How Moses Crossed the Atlantic: John Weemes and Philo-Semitism in Colonial New England"
The writings of the seventeenth-century Scottish philo-Semitic theologian John Weemes present an ideological basis for the incorporation of Mosaic law into seventeenth-century Puritan colonial legal codes that has never been recognized. There is a direct link between Weemes's insistence on the applicability of Mosaic moral and judicial (but not ceremonial) law in a Christian Commonwealth and the legal proposals and theories of Reverend John Cotton. New Haven's reliance on Cotton's work embedded the theories of Weemes into the colonial reality of civil government for a short time in the seventeenth century. The now obscure philo-Semitic writer's "tolerationist" views of the "Other" affected the colonial Puritans' views of themselves as rulers and subjects of a nascent religious polity. The Puritan law codes did not last, but Weemes's philo-Semitism may have had a lasting, negative impact in their wake when his views of the "Other" remained without the millenarian context for which they were designed. [WP # 00004]
Ulrike Kirchberger. "Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg and the Making of German Protestantism in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania"
Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg was a Protestant pastor who was sent to Pennsylvania in 1742 to take charge of three German Lutheran communities. He started to organize Lutheran life according to the ideas he had imported from Germany. The paper describes the way in which German religious concepts were transferred to Pennsylvania. In the new social and political context Protestant doctrines underwent a complex process of assimilation. The formation of a Lutheran church organization shows how ideas were changed under the pressures of a new system, and how certain aspects of European ideologies were retained and imposed on society in the New World. [WP # 00015]
Sarah Knott. "The Circulation and Americanization of Sensibility: Scotland to Philadelphia"
From the 1760s, the Scottish literati's discourse of sensibility was circulated to Philadelphia through the twin conduits of booksellers and physicians. The emigré bookman Robert Bell appropriated sentimentalism to create a new class- and gender-mixed reading audience who read eclecticly for pleasure and rational improvement. The founders of the colony's first medical school taught Scottish nervous theory—the physiology of sensibility—and styled themselves as men of sensibility. With the Revolution, sensibility was caught up in the project of nation-building. Benjamin Rush developed an americanized theory that depathologized bodily sensibility and articulated a medical basis for American morality. [WP # 00013]
Joseph S. Lucas. "Scottish Conjectural History, Indian Affairs, and Missionary Theory in the Early-Nineteenth-Century United States"
Scottish Enlightenment ideas shaped the thinking of American missionaries and government officials who professed concern for North American Indians. Enlightenment Scots who tried to chart humankind's progress from savagery to civilization relied heavily on European accounts of North American Indians to describe society in its earliest, most primitive form. In turn, citizens of the United States saw Indians in a new light with the help of the theoretical framework provided by the Scots. The Scots' stadial model of human development established the context for an early-nineteenth-century debate about the sources of cultural change, a debate fueled by anxiety about the fate of Indians. [WP # 00014]
Carmen McEvoy. "The Influence of Thomas Paine on Peruvian Republicanism, 1810-1822"
This paper proposes to analyze the republican press between 1791 and 1822 to establish the development of Peru's brand of republican ideology and the influence of Thomas Paine's writings on Lima's intellectual circles. In particular, I will contrast the main topics discussed by Paine with those treated by several Peruvian writers, Faustino Sanchez Carrion among them. This paper covers three themes that are deeply intertwined. One of them deals with the origins and main features of Peruvian republicanism. My approach to Peruvian republicanism pays attention to its Hispanic and Classical influences. The study of the way Paine's writings reached Latin America, especially the capital city of Peru, and the attraction they had for Lima's intellectual community help us to understand the circulation of ideas within the region in the early nineteenth century. I will conclude the essay with a discussion of the challenges that radical republicanism conveyed to the Peruvian political system, its society, and its culture. [WP # 00024]
María Elena Martínez. "Religion, Purity, and 'Race': The Spanish Concept of Limpieza de Sangre in Seventeenth-Century Mexico and the Broader Atlantic World"
Based mainly on an analysis of Inquisition records and a variety of other colonial documents, this paper studies the deployment of the early modern Spanish discourse of limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood") in New Spain. It argues that although purity of blood remained fundamentally a religious notion, Spaniards by the seventeenth century relied on its legal and genealogical principles to create a colonial hierarchical system of classification with "Old Christian" ancestry at the top. The study thus explains how a European religious discourse became the basis of a racialized colonial order; how the broad social, political, and economic transcontinental processes that began to forge the Atlantic world were accompanied by the rise of an ideology of Christian hierarchies that anticipated modern notions of "race." [WP # 00002]
Jochen Meißner. "Motivations, Ideas, Functions, Methodology and Styles of Nineteenth-Century Spanish-American Historiography"
One of the fields in which the exchange of ideas in the Atlantic World might be of special professional interest to historians is that of the history of historiography, that is, how certain ideas about how to look at history and how to study history "scientifically" shaped the development of national and transnational historiographical traditions. This paper looks at one aspect of the related problems: the relationship between Spanish American and European historiography in the nineteenth century, focusing especially on examples from Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. The heuristic scheme applied here was inspired by Jörn Rüsen's Historik, which centers on a division of historiography into five different aspects which, of course, influence each other, but can be separated analytically. These are: 1. interests and motivations; 2. leading ideas, ideological framework; 3. functions; 4. methodology; 5. forms and styles. Under these headings some examples are collected to develop a first glance of what might be special characteristics of Spanish American historiography between independence and the last decades of the nineteenth century. It is argued that these historiographies are usually considered as poorly working copies of European and North American models. The paper raises some doubts about this position and offers some counterexamples to make its point that searching for evidence of a certain internal dynamic in the historiographical discourses in certain Latin American regions might be an interesting research task to take up in the future. [WP # 00026]
Susan Newton-King. "Crimes against Nature at the Cape of Good Hope: A Short Paper about a Dog"
My paper is constructed around the story of a single individual, an elderly German knecht named Claas Holder, who committed suicide in 1713 on a remote farm in the interior of the Dutch Colony of Cape of Good Hope. He had allegedly been caught having sexual intercourse with one of the farm dogs, and he committed suicide within hours of being discovered. The paper has two aims: first, to tell Claas Holder's story and second, to contextualise and interpret his death. The circumstances surrounding his death may have been atypical, but his life was not. His single status, his poverty, and his relative anonymity (even in death his name was misspelt) were all typical of a certain sub-group of Europeans at the Cape—the so-called eenlopende mannen—Company servants and former Company servants who had failed to secure their position by marrying into an established settler family.
Given his insignificance within the colonial scheme of things, Holder's story is a short one, but the genealogy of the ideas that informed contemporary attitudes toward his aberrant behaviour is, by contrast, very long. Much of the paper is taken up with an attempt to understand and document this genealogy. A brief and preliminary sortie into the judicial archives in search of similar cases that were actually brought to trial was enough to convince me that this long genealogy did indeed have a bearing on the attitudes of judges, witnesses, and the accused in sodomy trials at the Cape of Good Hope.
Finally, I have allowed myself some tentative experiments with the process of narration. It seems to me that historians' preference for the stance of the covert, "extradiegetic" narrator is unnecessary. There is no reason, it seems to me, why we should not experiment with narrative voices, even "unreliable" narrative voices. Perhaps we cannot allow ourselves the novelist's latitude with respect to the imaginative reconstruction of events and characters, but there is no reason to think that we are any more capable than they of "getting the story right." [WP # 00009]
Anthony Page. " 'Liberty has an asylum': John Jebb, British Radicalism, and the American Revolution"
The American Revolution influenced the ideology and confidence of British radicals. This paper adds to our understanding of this process through a close examination of how a leading English radical perceived the conflict between colonies and parliament. The example set by the Americans encouraged John Jebb in his agitation for radical religious, educational and political reform, and led him to advocate universal manhood suffrage. Jebb imagined that America was a bastion of enlightened civic virtue, an impression strengthened by his acquaintance with the American ambassador, John Adams. [WP # 00010]
Elías José Palti. "The Problem of 'Misplaced Ideas' Revisited: Beyond the History of Ideas"
The object of this paper is to explore new perspectives regarding the dynamic of ideas and cultural exchange in peripheral areas (both in colonial and postcolonial contexts), in the light of the new realities developed in the last fin-de-siècle, utilizing the new conceptual tools provided by the recently developed disciplines and theories in the field. As I intend to show, Roberto Schwarz´s concept of "misplaced ideas," which provides the basic theoretical framework in which the topic has been so far approached, contains some basic shortcomings deriving from a rather crude linguistic view (which is inherent in the "history of ideas") that reduces language exclusively to its referential function. A more precise distinction of the different levels of language will help to reveal aspects and problems that this perspective obliterates. However, Schwarz´s proposal can be disentangled from its linguistic premises and re-elaborated, thus providing a more sophisticated theoretical framework to comprehend the intricacies of the processes of cultural exchange and, more specifically, the problematic dynamics of the ideas in Latin America that Schwarz intended to analyze. [WP # 00027]
Sarah Pearsall. " 'As good Wives ought to be': The Shifting Dynamics of Marriage and Authority"
This essay seeks to determine how conflict was reconciled within loving marriages. In social theory, marriage became less a government in which the husband "ruled" and more a partnership of loving equals. There are echoes of this new paradigm in letters from Revolutionary-era marriages in which the couple was separated by the Atlantic. The wives, at odds with their husbands, attempted to achieve their ends by deploying what I term "the coercive language of affection." Slaves, too, haltingly utilized this idiom, but with less success. Roles for white women and men shifted under the influence of intellectual currents that antedated and transcended the Revolution, most critically the Scottish Enlighten-ment. [WP # 00006]
Mauricio Damián Rivero. "Impure Acts: Sexual and Marital Regulation in the Spanish World"
This essay analyzes the examples of sexual and marital regulation attempted by the Spanish clergy as seen in the catechisms, confession manuals (confesionarios), and ecclesiastic legislation produced in Spain and the New World. By pointing out the scriptural and dogmatic origins of these sexual and marital regulations this essay demonstrates that they were strictly based on Tridentine theology rather than on cultural conflict, as other historians have held. The essay concludes that the Spanish clergy's attempts to regulate sexual and marital practices were an application of Catholic reform's ideology on the importance of acts for salvation. It also concludes that there was significant continuity between the regulatory attempts in Spain and Spanish America, demonstrating that these ideas of morality and the significance of acts crossed the Atlantic. In so doing this essay contributes to the literature on the subject of sexual regulation by demonstrating its integral relation to the theological conflicts and changes of Catholic reform. [WP # 00008]
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall. "Building an Atlantic Republican Network: Henri Grégoire, the Americas, and the Legacy of the French Revolution"
Historians who study early-nineteenth-century France have often noted that former French revolutionaries changed their politics, fled the country, or disappeared from public view in the wake of the Revolution's failure. This paper focuses on the revolutionary priest Henri Grégoire, in order to highlight another way in which frustrated republicans channeled their energies in the postrevolutionary years: across the Atlantic, to a new world full of possibilities. After the rise of Napoleon, Grégoire (who had been famous during the Revolution as the "friend of Jews and blacks") increasingly turned his gaze toward the young republics of the Western Hemisphere, especially the United States and Haiti. In the hope that republicanism could be perfected there in order to be reimported to Europe, he shared his views with American counterparts on matters ranging from slavery to agriculture. Despite Grégoire's occasional disagreements with colleagues in the Americas, his relationships with them underscore the existence of a transatlantic support network of republicans in the early nineteenth century. [WP # 00012]
Eric Slauter. "Political Slavery and the Circulation of Rights on the Eve of the American Revolution"
Drawing on materials by black and white writers from late colonial Massachusetts (pamphlets, slave petitions, the poetry of Phillis Wheatley), this essay investigates the circuitous appropriations of the language of political "slavery" on the eve of the American Revolution. By situating the metaphor of political slavery against a contemporary concept of cultural slavery, I try to account for the reluctance of whites to apply the metaphor of political slavery to black slaves. Instead of drawing a direct (if deferred) line of causality between the rhetoric of political slavery and black emancipation, I argue that we should look more closely at that rhetoric to help explain why justifications of chattel slavery based on the supposed mental and cultural inferiority of black people began to emerge in this period. [WP # 00013]
Holly Snyder. "The Jew as Citizen: Or, Moses Mendelssohn's Atlantic Moment, 1757-1831"
The Age of Democratic Revolutions represented a sea change in the lot of the Jews living in the nations of western Europe and their colonies throughout the Atlantic World. This paper examines trends in the religious, political, and intellectual developments attributed to the Enlightenment that facilitated these changes. The Seven Years War created the context in which a number of important currents of Enlightenment thought began to coalesce in ways that facilitated the expansion of Jewish rights and privileges. Although the role is frequently overlooked in the historiography, Britain and its colonies were key participants in the development of civil emancipation for Jews between 1750 and 1835. [WP # 00003]
Denise Spellberg. "Islam on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Voltaire's Mahomet as a Transatlantic Case Study in the History of Ideas"
Mahomet, as an intellectual vehicle, represents an interdisciplinary case study in the transatlantic dissemination of ideas about power and religion. The paper traces how Voltaire's original work of 1741 was transformed over time, both as text and performance, through the year 1782. French, British, Irish, and American versions of the play each reflect varied changes in language, title, characters, and actor/director intent. Prologues, which were added throughout the public performance of the work, preserve the changing interpretation of the play, as newspaper reviews, broadsides, and engravings record aspects of unique public responses to staged events. In this process, the fluidity of ideas in action, on and off stage, may be illumined according to specific historical contexts and conflicts. The circulation of ideas, ostensibly about Islam, would be transformed through one theatrical work into a forum for a series of dynamic polemics about faith, empire, and identity. [WP # 00005]
Mark G. Spencer. "The Circulation of David Hume's Works in Eighteenth-Century America"
This working paper is a fragment of a larger project that aims to describe and analyze the circulation and reception of David Hume's ideas in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America (1740-1830). Part One of this working paper illuminates the dissemination of Hume's works in colonial America, largely by tabulating the hitherto untapped data in early American book catalogues. The image that emerges suggests that more of Hume's works circulated in America earlier, and more widely, than modern scholars have thought. Part Two, by fleshing out the 326 subscribers to the often-overlooked first American edition of Hume's History of England, carries this discussion through to the late eighteenth-century when the circulation of Hume's works in America reached its high-water mark. [WP # 00011]
Peter Vogt. "The Circulation and Transformation of Ideas about the Church in the Atlantic World: The Case of German Immigrant Groups in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania"
Looking at the specific case of religious communities who migrated from Germany to Pennsylvania between 1683 and 1740, this paper examines the transfer and transformation of ideas about the church in the transatlantic world. It is argued that a variety of ecclesiastical groups with different ideas about the church emerged in Reformation and post-Reformation Germany and that these ideas can be classified with a typology of church, sect, and spiritual-individualism. Through the German immigrant groups each of these types was brought to Pennsylvania. While ideas of the church associated with the sect type and the spiritual-individualistic type proved congenial, in the Pennsylvania environment of religious freedom and diversity, the church type understanding faced considerable challenges that necessitated its transformation. [WP # 00016]
Stephen A. Wilson. "A Reassessment of the Reformation Context of Jonathan Edwards' Puritan Heritage"
The suspicion about "works righteousness" in certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century conceptions of Calvinism has been something of a stumbling block to the study of Jonathan Edwards (1703-58). It has led some interpreters to de-emphasize the high priority his ethics assigned to virtue, and others to question his orthodoxy altogether. New developments in Reformation scholarship locate Puritanism within a conversation encompassing both Calvinistic Reformed thought and the robust ethical concerns implicit in the ecclesiastical reforms of Martin Bucer (1491-1551), the covenant theology of Heinrich Bullinger (1504-75), and the eschatology that English dissenters shared with Continental Anabaptists. Reconnecting the intellectual heritage of early America with its proper European context helps to free Edwards' ethics from the false constraints of later theological "scruples." {WP &35; 00021]
| Overview | Seminars | Working Papers | Workshops |
| Newsletter | Other Resources | Photo Album | Site Map |
© 2000 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.Created August 13, 2000; last revised September 13, 2000.