Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England by Elisabeth Ceppi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England by Elisabeth Ceppi Richard A. Bailey (bio) Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England Elisabeth Ceppi Dartmouth College Press, 2018. xiii + 276 pp. $95 cloth, $45 paperback Scholars have long described the New England colonies as marked by social hierarchy. From family life to church life to political life (both near and far), hierarchical relationships dominated the lives of New Englanders. Such hierarchies privileged certain segments of the colonial societies—especially whites and males. In Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service [End Page 220] in Early New England, Elisabeth Ceppi explores many of these privileged relationships, arguing that Puritan religious culture and New England economic culture were connected by currencies of obedient service, which included and made sense of the gendered and raced components of the covenant dialectic of New England. Reading the lives and experiences of New Englanders like Elizabeth Knapp, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, and Samson Occom alongside those of Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, Ceppi presents a fresh look at the ways New Englanders of all sorts lived with the demands of their respective covenants. In order to demonstrate her readings of service in early New England, Ceppi begins with chapters that explore servitude within the "little commonwealth" (25) of the family, focusing particularly on the service rendered by children in colonial society. This "lived metaphor" (18) of the obedient child proves crucial to her treatment of the larger "Puritan project" (18). Her notion of "evangelical obedience" relies on the doctrines of humiliation and adoption (29). Once she establishes how these concepts factored into the concept of obedient service, Ceppi then sets out to show the various ways New England Puritans interpreted key biblical passages, such as the parable of the Prodigal Son. These passages informed the everyday relationships of authors like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, both of whom fail to demonstrate true evangelical obedience. Other perhaps less well-known instances become the focus of the rest of her study. Over the next couple of chapters, Ceppi develops some of the ways that servitude was gendered and racialized in early New England. Her close readings of several specific episodes make each chapter work equally well on its own and collectively. The strange story of Elizabeth Knapp serves as the backdrop for her treatment of at least some of the ways that obedient service took on a gendered component. In 1671, Knapp struggled with service to God or to Satan as she experienced a period described by those around her, especially the minister Samuel Willard, as demonic possession. As she analyzes the "drama of consent" that ensued, Ceppi explores the ways that New Englanders attempted to make sense of the strange goings-on in their community, relying on hierarchy, service, and gender (52). While Knapp's extraordinary experience ended up being treated and explained in the context of gender, Ceppi takes a different approach when she examines the extraordinary life of Mary Rowlandson. Upon her captivity, Rowlandson found herself in a "wilderness thick with masters" (86). As Ceppi reads Rowlandson's narrative, she argues that the captive woman's racial difference from her new Nipmuck masters offers a different way of reading the servant-master relationship. This racialization of obedient service continues with Ceppi's treatment of African slavery in colonial New [End Page 221] England, especially in the works of Cotton Mather and the back-and-forth exchange between John Saffin and Samuel Sewell. In these writings, Ceppi builds a strong case that the Protestant "work ethic was a racial vocation" (119). Her examination of these texts demonstrates that this racial vocation served as the foundation for a Puritan "calling of whiteness" (146). This notion of whiteness becomes even more evident as she compares sermons and manuals aimed at enslaved Africans with those directed toward white servants. Such evidence in the servant-master relationship, then, reinforces her description of this racial vocation. Even with sources that have been examined fairly regularly, like Rowlandson's narrative, the debate between Sewell and Saffin, or the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Elisabeth Ceppi offers a...