Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

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СКАЧАТЬ outside the bounds of this book, it is important to note that “Dawnland” or eastern Algonquian peoples such as the Wabanakis continued to exert powerful influence over English and French efforts farther north and east long after King Philip’s War had weakened most southern Algonquian groups.³¹ Natives were much more than pawns on a European chessboard; the English and other Europeans often only dimly perceived the complex political calculations of which they were only one part.

      The late seventeenth century was a pivotal period for Native peoples in southern New England, with King Philip’s War, shifting intertribal alliances, and ever-expanding land encroachment by the English. Economic relationships also shifted after New England colonial governments disestablished wampum as a legal currency.³² While King Philip’s War and later conflicts were devastating to many southeastern Native tribes, Algonquians did not disappear from southern New England after 1676.³³ However, after that point they could not marshal direct military opposition to the English, and it became increasingly difficult for individual Natives and Africans to win recognition or space from the English for their competing worldviews.

      The late seventeenth century was also a difficult time in the puritan Atlantic. In the years after the failure of the Protectorate and through the reign of George I, the aim of a pure Protestant community seemed under attack from every direction. The period after 1660 saw the increasingly strict enforcement of the decrees and practices of the Church of England on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and on the western side, the revocation of the Massachusetts Bay charter, the institution and downfall of the Dominion of New England, and heightened warfare with Algonquian peoples, including the extremely bloody King Philip’s War. With the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 ending the toleration of Protestants in France, it seemed as if Protestantism was in danger of being wiped from the face of the earth. In 1688 and 1689, royal officials’ attempts to hide the news that the Protestant William of Orange had taken over the English throne from the Catholic James II seemed to point to a Catholic conspiracy to put the colonies under the control of France and—by extension—the pope.³⁴ For those who were convinced or hopeful that Protestant countries, especially England, were to take part in bringing about the new Jerusalem, the prospect of their apostasizing to Catholicism was seen as a portent of Satan’s imminent triumph.³⁵

      Disconnect between religious affiliation and political boundaries intensified anxiety about the fate of countries and empires. Once England became Protestant, high-level and popular rhetoric about the imperial powers of Portugal, Spain, and France often couched rationale for fears of, and wars with, these polities as a religious battle between Protestant and Catholic.³⁶ But English Catholics and French Huguenots complicated any simple correspondence between English and Protestant, or French and Catholic.³⁷ The commercial rivalry between the two Protestant powers of England and the Netherlands resulted in three wars during the seventeenth century, testimony that religious affiliation was not the only concern driving foreign policy. Ireland remained a potent Catholic force at the geographic core of an English empire. Many English Protestants asked themselves what it meant to be a professor of the faith and a member of a community, commonwealth, nation, and empire, uncertainty only intensified by their interactions with each other and with Natives and Africans.

      Race, Religion, and Identity

      Techniques of differentiation based on skin color, religion, and gender were not new to the seventeenth century, nor did Europeans have a monopoly on them. Neither the seventeenth century, nor the eighteenth century, nor the sixteenth century is the origin point for a calcified notion of biological race. Indeed, the search for that origin point distracts our attention from the ways in which categories of difference have functioned at specific times and places.³⁸ European intellectuals did spend many pages trying to figure out the cause and meaning of human difference during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as their societies came into contact with peoples in Africa and the Americas, but their answers drew upon religion as well as upon skin color and freedom status. The latter markers of categorization were not the only or most important ones to which English colonists turned in the middle of the seventeenth century. Religious affinity was often a more significant component of identity in the period.

      From the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries, Europeans increasingly defined difference racially rather than religiously, but their concept of race remained inflected by religious ways of marking difference. English and other European descriptions of Jews used rhetoric about their existence as a visually different race and linked supposed character traits to physiognomy. The English likened Spanish and French Catholics to the indigenous people with whom they interacted. Thus framed, the separation between Protestants and Catholics frequently overshadowed variations among particular strains of English dissenters. That evolution of difference drew on elements of a transatlantic intellectual culture but was also rooted in local circumstances. Differences in religion often provided a language for Europeans to express their perceived superiority over Africans and indigenous people of the Americas, superiority that could have bodily characteristics. Upon encountering southern Algonquian settlements inhabited only by the dead or dying, some puritans in the 1620s and 1630s interpreted Natives’ susceptibility to European disease as a sign that the English were meant to rule over the land.³⁹

      The religious and racial currents of categorization ebbed and flowed across each other in more than one place. European theologians wrote treatises on the origins of Africans and Indians according to biblical accounts.⁴⁰ Puritan divines and enthusiasts in Old and New England picked up on some of those themes of the origins of all people. Some put forth the idea that Natives were one of the Lost Tribes and the eastern coast of North America the new Israel, as support for their decision to leave England. This theory of Indians’ Israelite origins also encouraged metropolitan support for the colonies. By supporting the colonies, the English in Old England would be supporting Indian conversion, which would help bring about the second coming of Christ and the millennium. For others, Indians were Gentiles and could only experience mass conversion after the conversion of the Jews. A few might be eligible for conversion before the millennium, but their origins precluded their attainment of Christianity before that series of events.⁴¹ The discussion hinged on the issue of America’s relative place in Europe’s sense of space, and whether America was a long-separated part of the same whole, or an entirely different entity whose full incorporation into the European Christian world required the end of this world.

      The indeterminacy and tension between different categories of belonging and affinity (race, region, gender, and religion) is what makes attention to identity a useful means for unraveling the complexities of seventeenth-century social structures. Identity emphasizes the significance of religious affiliation as a means to determine insider/outsider status, as determined primarily through practice in addition to any explicit, articulated theological stance. In this context, the term points to the ways in which people related to each other and created categories of difference. Individuals and groups took what was soft, malleable, and contested, and described it as if it were hard, intrinsic, and non-negotiable, even as they maintained multiple allegiances.⁴²

      Puritan spiritual concerns reorganized the priorities of state, class, race, and gender as grounds for drawing boundary lines between insider and outsider. Religious concepts shaped ideologies of race and gender in case law regulating unlawful sex. The moments of contention caught in the court records record the struggle over believing bodies and their proper regulation—how people ought to behave. These moments permit the reconstruction of localized communities and small-scale relationships, the particularities of small groups of people. But this microlevel of reconstruction has greater implications. English colonial courts’ struggle to discipline individual bodies of fornicators was part of a larger process of creating and using categories of subjection, domination, and privilege. Individuals disagreed over the boundaries of the community and how to determine who might belong to it. They turned to the critical factors of race and religion to define those boundaries and to make them appear inevitable and unchangeable, rather than contingent on context. Many English Protestants who dissented from the established Church of England came to accept race as a dividing СКАЧАТЬ