Passing as a pastor: Clerical imposture in the Colonial Atlantic World

Religion and American Culture

Volumn 14, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 149-174

  Kidd, Thomas ^a  

^a BAYLOR UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247651888     PISSN: 10521151     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rac.2004.14.2.149     Document Type: Article

References (109)

1. Cotton Mather, The Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (New York: Ungar, n.d.), 1:313
2. Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 142
3. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 263, 448
4. J. William T. Youngs, Jr., God's Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 74
5. Richard P. Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly: The Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679-1749 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 153-54
6. and James W. Schmotter, "The Irony of Clerical Professionalism: New England's Congregational Ministers and the Great Awakening," American Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 150
7. On passing, see Elaine K. Ginsberg, ed., Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996)
8. Nicholas Canny, "In Search of a Better Home? European Overseas Migration, 1500-1800," in Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 263-83
9. and Mary Beth Norton, "Communal Definitions of Gendered Identity in Seventeenth-Century English America," in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 40-67
10. On the politics of speech and power in colonial New England, especially as related to religious speech, see Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5-6
11. Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 2-3
12. and Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 40-51
13. Elaine K. Ginsberg, "The Politics of Passing," in Ginsberg, Passing and the Fictions of Identity, 1-5
14. Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 191
15. David Waldstreicher, "Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 56, no. 2 (April 1999): 262
16. and Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982)
17. Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), 114
18. The Religious Impostor Unmask'd (Charleston, S.C., 1795), 11-12
19. A. Owen Aldridge, "A Mock-Epic on Early American Methodism," in Finding Colonial Americas: Essays Honoring J. A. Leo Lemay, ed. Carla Mumford and David S. Shields (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 183-98
20. David Harley, "Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession," American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (April 1996): 327-28
21. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 124-43
22. Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670-1780 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001)
23. Waldstreicher, "Reading the Runaways," 249
24. See, among others, Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class, 169-88
25. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 55-80
26. Youngs, God's Messengers, 64-92
27. and Miller, The New England Mind
28. Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Knopf, 2002)
29. Cotton Mather, A Warning to the Flocks (Boston, 1700), A2
30. Mather, A Warning, 7
31. John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 121
32. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 163-88
33. On the founding of the Brattle Street Church, see, among others, Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power, 43
34. David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 224
35. and John Corrigan, The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 27-31
36. Mather, Diary, 1:337-38
37. Clifford Shipton, Sibley's Harvard Graduates, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), 93, 119-20
38. Ebenezer Turrell, The Life and Character of the Reverend Benjamin Colman (Boston, 1749), 5
39. Brattle Square Church, A Manifesto (Boston, 1699), 1
40. Hunter, Purchasing Identity, 94-96
41. On the proclivity toward isolationism and the hostility toward cosmopolitanism in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, see Louise A. Breen, Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630-1692 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 6, 98
42. Patricia Crain has noted that the Roman alphabet only became standardized around 1800, and spelling was similarly unsettled before then. Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 42
43. Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, 166
44. On the changing ideas about authorship, plagiarism, fixity, and reliability in print in early modern England, see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
45. [Cotton Mather and others], Proposals, for the Preservation of Religion (Boston, 1702)
46. Schmotter, "Clerical Professionalism," 151
47. Breen, Transgressing the Bounds, 143, 212-20
48. on Colman's cosmopolitanism, see Corrigan, The Prism of Piety, 17
49. and Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 127-47
50. On Willard and the Third Church's role in helping Colman and the Brattle Street Church, see Mark Peterson, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 169-72
51. On Cotton's support related to the May controversy, see Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 225-26
52. and Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 277-79
53. Quoted in Patricia Bonomi, "'Watchful against the Sects': Religious Renewal in Pennsylvania's German Congregations, 1720-1750," Pennsylvania History 50, no. 4 (1983): 276
54. Randall Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 134
55. and Douglas Jacobsen, "Johann Bernhard van Dieren: Peasant Preacher at Hackensack, New Jersey, 1724-40," New Jersey History 100 (1982): 15-30
56. Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991)
57. and Frank Lambert, "Pedlar in Divinity": George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994)
58. Steven C. Bullock, "A Mumper among the Gentle: Tom Bell, Colonial Confidence Man," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 55, no. 2 (April 1998): 231-32, 243
59. T. H. Breen and Timothy Hall, "Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experience of Social Change in Eighteenth-Century New England," American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1430
60. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire, 106-7
61. Breen and Hall, "Structuring Provincial Imagination," 1430
62. William Kidder, ed., "The Diary of Nicholas Gilman" (M.A. thesis, University of New Hampshire, 1972), 320-21
63. Daniel Rogers, diary, May 9, 1743, New York Historical Society
64. On Gilman, see Charles Clark," Nicholas Gilman: He Set a Frontier Town to Dancing," New Hampshire Profiles (May 1976), 46-54
65. Bullock, "A Mumper among the Gentle," 253
66. The Wonderful Narrative: or, A Faithful Account of the French Prophets (Boston, 1742), 86-89
67. Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 31-32
68. Edwin Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 89
69. See also William Hooper, The Apostles neither Impostors nor Enthusiasts (Boston, 1742)
70. and Gaustad, Great Awakening, 78
71. John Caldwell, An Impartial Trial of the Spirit (Boston, 1742), 11
72. Halttunen, Confidence Men, 52-53
73. John White, Secret Prayer Inculcated (Boston, 1719)
74. Benjamin Wadsworth, The Danger of Hypocrisy (Boston, 1711), 30-35, quotes on 30, 35
75. See also Cotton Mather, The Tried Professor (Boston, 1719)
76. John Flavel, The Touchstone of Sincerity: or, The Signs of Grace and Symptoms of Hypocrisy (1679; repr., Boston, 1731)
77. and Joseph Seccombe, Reflections on Hypocrisy (Boston, 1741)
78. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith and others (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 150-53
79. Bullock, "A Mumper among the Gentle," 253-54
80. Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 48
81. See also Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 150
82. Quoted in Waldstreicher, "Reading the Runaways," 255
83. See also Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 18-19
84. See Gordon Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 39, no. 3 (1982): 401-41
85. and Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 144-59
86. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 77-78
87. David Waldstreicher, "'Fallen Under My Observation': Vision and Virtue in The Coquette," Early American Literature 27 (1992): 207
88. William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit (1857; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 1:530-31
89. Robert A. Gross, "The Confidence Man and the Preacher: The Cultural Politics of Shays's Rebellion," in In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion, ed. Robert A. Gross (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 308
90. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, 531
91. Joseph Lathrop, Christ's Warning to the Churches, 6th ed. (Boston, 1793), 6-7
92. Daniel Williams, "In Defense of Self: Author and Authority in the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs," Early American Literature 25, no. 2 (1990): 96-122
93. Larry Cebula, "A Counterfeit Identity: The Notorious Life of Stephen Burroughs," Historian 64, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 317-34
94. Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 155-163
95. and Christopher W. Jones, "Praying upon Truth: The Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs and the Picaresque," Early American Literature 30, no. 1 (1995): 32-50
96. Williams, "In Defense of Self," 100
97. Stephen Burroughs, Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs, ed. Philip Gura (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 47-50
98. Williams, "In Defense of Self," 103
99. Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 34-36
100. Burroughs, Memoirs, 67-68
101. Gross, "The Confidence Man and the Preacher," 299-301
102. Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1975), 1:606
103. Brooks, The Refiner's Fire, 171-74
104. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 162
105. Hatch, Democratization, 36
106. cited in Juster, Doomsayers, 23
107. Susan Juster, "Demagogues or Mystagogues? Gender and the Language of Prophecy in the Age of Democratic Revolutions," American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (December 1999): 1575
108. and Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 246-72
109. On the benefits of the cosmopolitan market orientation, see Peterson, Price of Redemption