For MRC
First off, let me just thank you for taking the time. Second off, I must apologise for not getting back to you earlier. I must say that I had a great deal of difficulty getting into this book. I actually ended up skipping most of the Introduction because I didn't understand. Chapter 1 was similarly daunting. Oddly though, after I finished Ch. 1 and started into Ch. 2, either my comprehension improved or the author's style became clearer. :-)
*sigh* I had such great plans to be a wonderful student. I hope you don't think ill of me.
I got diverted by stuff like "What the hell kind of a name is 'Increase' anyway?" I had to know how all these Mathers were related. So the only one I'm not sure of now is Nathaniel. There were a couple, it seems. So Richard is the father of Increase, who is the father of Cotton. All clear now.
Also, I now understand what a 'broadside' is, and a 'folio', having spent some time with Wikipedia in the bookbinding section. I feel a bit silly not knowing, since I have recently seen "National Treasure" with Nicholas Cage, wherein the "Dunlop Broadsides" figured prominently.
Some notes on my choice of format:
- I have backdated this entry so that it doesn't appear farther up and confuse people who visit me here. You may recognise some of them. Others you may not, but you know them. I don't know if you've perused the blogs before, but they're a lot of fun. So far, we are mostly girls in this little circle. I know there are a couple of the OT menfolk who lurk. You can be one of them, or join us.
- This blog isn't exactly a secret, but I don't tell everyone about it either. I mean, the people I've linked have all linked me too, but you can only get here by a link, because it's not in the directory.
- My blog doesn't require that you register with Blogger, but some do.
- I thought it might be easier to pass messages this way. If I'm wrong, we can go back to PMing and no harm done.
*****
David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Harvard University Press, 1990) ISBN 0674962168
Questions:
1. How did literacy make Puritanism more empowering for the laity (non-clergy church members)?
Since the average person could read, the average person could access the Bible himself. The clergy was no longer the filter through which all knowledge of the Scripture passed.
What's more, the average person could write books himself, if he so chose. Several lay authors chose to write about comets, for example.
2. What were some examples of laity religious empowerment?
Mr. Hall notes that some laypeople would challenge the Biblical knowledge of the minister, as in the case of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who claimed to have "bested one of the ministers in a contest over Scripture" (pg.62) and the case of Thomas Goold (pg. 63), who also engaged in debate with orthodox ministers.
A case could also be made that religious empowerment took the form of the marketplace. In order for books to sell, ministers had to write what people wanted to hear, or what they would read. (This amuses me.)
3. Did this empowerment affect the growth of the independent character of Americans?
I haven't got this far into the book yet, but I'm thinking it sure didn't hurt. How could it not affect everything else? If the people then were taking interpretation of the Bible into their own hands, why not other things as well? Of course, colonies need to be self-sufficient in any event. To rely too heavily on the old country could be disastrous, considering that it would take months to get anything they requested, even if it was an emergency.
******
In reading Chapter 2, I was struck by the fact that wonders never cease. Sorry. OK, so the people in New England and Regular England frequently wrote down and told each other about "Wonders" and curioities and that sort of thing. In particular, people could be posssessed by the devil. People died mysterious deaths at the hands of the devil, or God meting out punishment. Babies talked from the crib. And people believed this. I wonder how they could, here with my modern sensibilties.
But then, my daughter and I were watching a show on "mysteries" the other day. They were discussing aliens and the possibility of aliens on Earth, etc. They pointed out that alien stories are eye-witness accounts. No science or hard evidence to back it up. Urban legends would be another example. Look at snopes.com to see some of the things people will believe, since it happened to someone that the writer of the original email knows. Really. Honest. This seems very like the wonder stories that Mr. Hall discusses. I guess we never realy grow out of some things, as a people.
Even still, I have to wonder: are they all hoaxes? So too wondered the colonists, I'm sure. Where there's smoke there's fire, after all. Some of the stories had to be true, right? The show on aliens conducted a hoax and fooled quite a few people into thinking they had seen a UFO and then an alien running in a field. They noted that when some people said "Yeah, that's what I saw", other people jumped on board and soon everyone believed that's what they had seen. If there were any skeptics, they weren't shown.
I would think that every new tale reinforces the truth of older tales, so that it seems a body of evidence is piling up. But that doesn't explain the beginnings. And I like to know about beginnings.
Digression: I have a theory that all superstition began with someone trying to find a pattern or a portent. So, for example: Maybe Granny had a clot just waiting to get stuck in her heart. A bird flies into the house. Mom and Dad shoo it out and all is well. Later that night, Granny dies of a heart attack in her sleep. And there you are: bird in the house means a death in the family.
So, where do the wonders begin? Is it the same as my little superstition theory? Someone said: "I don't believe unless God or the Devil drops by to prove they exist" and the aneurysm that's been waiting to happen finally shows up a couple minutes later? There might be convulsions, one side of the body goes slack. It would look pretty bad, though not gruesome or anything. Would the story grow in the re-telling?
I've really gone on there. Sorry.
posted by Seana @ 10:47 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
I'm one of the Others. Ahhhhh! :-)
I'm kinda swamped this week. Actually (cross-thresd), I'm REALLY busy this week, so I'll save any brilliant replies that I have until next week.
I wanted to commend you, however, on your thoughtful post. If only you were one of my regular students! *sigh*
mrc
*whew* I was afraid that my tendency towards tangents would make you roll your eyes like the poor professors who taught me in university. *grin*
I understand about busy. Since I'm at home, I've been babysitting and doing favours and such. It cuts into my Internet and reading time.
An Other? Does that mean you're a blurker? Where do you visit?
Looking forward to discussing with you when you have the time.
Okay. Having read your response, I can see that I misjudged you. I should have asked tougher questions.
Your answers to my questions are spot on and don't need much commnet. Let me add some thoughts, though.
What happened in the American colonies was, in microcosm, what had occurred during the Protestant Reformation. One of the reasons that Luther, Calvin et al were so influential was because people could read. Of course, that was because of rising literacy rates and the avilablilty of printed documents because of the printing press. (Parenthetical trivia--The printing press was also instrumental in making Christopher Columbus and his voyages famous. Without it, ole Chris would have been just another dood.)
If the people then were taking interpretation of the Bible into their own hands, why not other things as well? This is a crucial point that I wanted you to get from the book. The colonies' fight for independence was predicated on previously successful challenges to the status quo. Religion was one of the main battlefields on which the colonists flexed their challenge of authority. The book on Whitefield reinforces this idea, btw.
Religion as part of the marketplace--this is also an important idea. Religious folks don't like to say so, but religion involves marketing. Not just books, CDs, WWJD bracelets, though. To convince someone else that they need to convert, one essentially has to "sell" the potential convert on why s/he would want to embrace a new or another religion. As a religious person myself, this is a difficult idea to embrace, but I think it is valid in many cases. (Parenthetical note--personally, I hope something else, something supernatural, is involved in a conversion experience, but realistically and based on personal observation, it often is a transaction, not a life-changing epiphany.)
I'm off to a meeting, so I'll address your other comments, which were very interesting, later today. Cheers!
mrc
Hope your meeting went well.
I am endlessly pleased to have shown myself smarter than you thought, rather than stupider. :D
The colonies' fight for independence was predicated on previously successful challenges to the status quo.
This makes so much sense. I hadn't quite made that connection.
Also: the church I grew up in was very mindful of marketing to non-Christians. We charged a small amount for Christmas plays and Easter musicals in order that people would feel that they were attending a show, rather than being preached at or asked for money (offering plate). The shows were quite theatrical. I was in the orchestra - I play viola - and our choir was huge. Oddly, this is part of why I stopped attending that church: "fake ice and fireworks". Seriously...one of our members had skated in the Olympics, so we had this plexiglass thing for her to skate on, and those indoor fireworks. Ack. I'm all about the quiet moments of reflection, so this didn't resonate with me, though they always had to add more performances. Good grief, I've gone on again.
Oh, I have spoken to the relative at the local university and as alumni I am entitled to take out books, provided I pay them a membership fee. Money is an issue, so for now I'm going to have to try to work within the public library system. Would it be too lazy to ask if the other books you were considering might be just as informative?
Thank-you for your comments. They realy opened a few things up for me. I do love new information.
My meeting snowballed into more than I thought. Sorry. Also, I didn't mean to imply that I thought you weren't smart. :-(
So, were these peeps nutso for believing in the supernatural/miracles, or were they legitimate? It's hard to say historically.
The best example of the Puritan belief in the supernatural was, of course, the Salem witch trials, which were really just a small part of a much larger witchcraft phenomenon in the Western world. Conservative estimates place the number of those accused of witchcraft at 110,000 during the early modern period (16th-17th centuries), with half of that number executed. (The numbers are probably twice that, actually, but certainly not as outlandishly high as the several million proposed by some historians.)
Anyway, in Salem, there is a burst of witchcraft accusations in 1692 that follows the general Western pattern: those accused are older women who are on the fringes of society. This pattern has led some historians to claim that the witch hunts of yesteryear, both in Salem and elsewhere, were based on misogyny. (They have also claimed, at various times, that the Salem trials were attributable to rivalries between Salem Town and Salem Village or that fungus on crops in the area worked as a hallucinatory drug to intoxicate the people and produce such irrational behavior.) There is evidence to support all of these claims. There is also the argument that these women were targeted because they did not conform to the Puritan order.
Personally, I think that while there might be some truth to a couple of these theories, the witch hunt in Salem started because the young girls who made the initial accusations were looking for attention. Adults might then have taken advantage of those accusations to settle long-standing feuds or to get their hands on land/property owned by certain women.
The point of my rambling is that there seems to be a rational reason to explain what happened in Salem. What they attributed to Satan, we attribute to other, more rational factors. Your point about wonders, then, is well-taken.
But what if there was something else going on, something supernatural? Every society in human history has claimed the existence of supernatural forces, from the Mesopotamian deities, through Greek and Roman mythology, to African spirits of nature and ancestors. Even mainstream religions like Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, etc., embrace the supernatural. Why? Is it just as basic human need to explain the unexplainable, as you suggested, or is it a valid observation?
I had an interview with an elite Midwestern college a couple of years ago. The professor interviewing me threw me off-guard halfway through the interview when he began talking about religion. He asked me if I had ever witnessed a miracle. I thought this was a bizarre question, but I told him that I had and related an experience that DW had while on a mission trip. He then proceeded to share that he was an atheist, but that his mother swore that she had spiritual visions. He then told me that he had to rethink his ideas about religion because he believed his mother was telling the truth, even though it was not rational to him. (BTW, it was the strangest interview that I have ever had, and I didn’t get the job either!)
To bring it back to history, it is difficult to “prove” anything about religious experiences, either now or then. And we certainly can find rational, logical, and reasonable explanations for what past humans have explained as miracles or supernatural intervention. But I personally think it is arrogant for modern humans to dismiss all claims made by past peoples about the supernatural. Maybe we’ll have a scientific answer in a hundred years, but maybe we will never have an answer for some things. Whether it is God, mind-meld, nature, or whatever, some things simply are not explainable.
As for the other books, don’t mortgage your future to get them. I’ll see if I can’t get a list of alternates to give you some flexibility.
mrc
As for the other books, don’t mortgage your future to get them. I’ll see if I can’t get a list of alternates to give you some flexibility.
I'd appreciate that. :-)
You make some good points about the supernatural. I have a hang-up about things being explained. I'm afraid I'm not a religious person, or even a spiritual one. Maybe I could call myself "philisophical" or maybe "meditative" or something, because it's not like I don't think about things.
I remember hearing once that the witch trials might have been caused by some bad turkey that led to hallucinations.
Of course, just about everything I know about that period comes from having read "The Crucible", so...
Now I'd better go read the rest of that book. :-)
Oh, and too, um...bad...you didn't get that job.
I'll bet yearly reviews would have been fun.
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