Scottish in the Margins of New France: Marie Hiroüin de la Conception, a Nun at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Seventeenth-Century Québec

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.-J. C. Beaglehole, of the Victoria University of Wellington, was until his death in 1970 the doyen of New Zealand historians and-together with J. W. Davidson of the Australian National University, who died in 1973-a leader in developing historical consciousness and historiography in the South Pacific world area. His editions of the journals of Captain Cook and his Life of Captain James Cook (published in 1974 by Stanford University Press) are not only masterpieces of scholarship and insight into the eighteenth century but unrivaled in their penetration of oceanic, as well as merely maritime, history. The New Zealand Historical Association maintains an annual lecture in his memory, and the essay which follows was originally delivered as the first Beaglehole Memorial lecture when that association met at the University of Canterbury in May 1973. It was subsequently printed in the New Zealand Journal of History (vol. 8, no. 1, April 1974) and is republished here with minor alterations by the generous permission of that journal's editors. What follows is a modified version of an essay in historical restatement, which owes much to John Beaglehole's own vision and his understanding of what vision is.

Prague workshop, Pietà, c. 1400, from amongst the sculptures found beneath Bern Minster, 1986. Limestone, original height c. 85–90cm. Bern: Historisches Museum. Photo: Bernisches Historisches Museum/S. Rebsamen. The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The iconoclasm precipitated by the Protestant Reformation was unprecedented in its scope: throughout northern Europe sculptures, altarpieces, paintings, stained-glass windows and ecclesiastical treasures fell victim to the purifying zeal of evangelical reformers. Images that had been venerated for generations were labelled as idols, and smashed to pieces (plate 1). Churches that had been filled with representations of sacred history were stripped bare. In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the value of visual representations. Theologians provided detailed guidelines for their production and use, and wealthy patrons stimulated the revival of religious art. While Protestantism devalued images and privileged hearing over seeing, the importance that Catholicism accorded to the visual was made manifest in the art and architecture of the baroque. The broad outlines of this history are familiar and incontestable. With regard to religious images, the Reformation certainly brought about a dramatic bifurcation, both at the level of theological debate and at the level of lived piety. Yet the Protestant destruction and the Catholic defence of images were merely two parts of a more complex story. The essays gathered together in this volume analyze the myriad ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The special issue examines the nature of images produced during the early years of the evangelical movement, asking how both theologians and artists responded to a new understanding of Christian history and soteriology. It traces the rich and diverse Protestant visual cultures that developed during the confessional age, and explores the variety of Catholic responses to pressure for reform. At the volume's heart lies a desire to understand how religious art was shaped by the splintering of Western Christendom that began five hundred years ago with Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther's own position with regard to religious images was far from straightforward. From 1522 he was a determined opponent of iconoclasm. Yet for Luther images were peripheral to true piety. In 1545, towards the end of his life, he preached a sermon in which he spoke of the two kingdoms present upon earth, ‘the kingdom of Christ and the worldly kingdom’. Christ's kingdom, through which we achieve salvation, is ‘a hearing-kingdom, not a seeing-kingdom; for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears must do this’.1 Here Luther privileged hearing above seeing – word over image – in a manner characteristic of evangelical teaching. Reformed theologians went much further. John Calvin undertook a thorough attack on the ‘superstitions of popery’. Idolatry – understood as a diminution of the honour due to God – occupied a more prominent place in his thought that in Luther's. Reformed Protestantism rewrote the Decalogue, making the prohibition of images a decree in its own right, and directed Christian worship towards a God who transcended all materiality.2 Yet Protestant piety was not fundamentally opposed to the visual. Even in his 1545 sermon, Luther accepted ‘visual sensation as part of the work that must be done to create religious conviction’.3 The Reformation, at least in its Lutheran manifestation, sought not to reject religious seeing, but rather to control it and the other senses (including hearing) through faith. The Catholic Church's defence of religious imagery was similarly nuanced. At its twenty-fifth session (3 December 1563) the Council of Trent stated that images were to be honoured, but not in a superstitious manner. Holy images – as opposed to idols – were of great value because through them Christians were moved to adore Christ, to remember the examples of the saints, and to cultivate piety. Theologians – most notably Johannes Molanus (1533–85) and Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97) – expanded on these themes.4 Catholic patrons commissioned illustrated books, devotional prints, paintings, sculpture and architecture, seeking to use images, as well as words, to awaken the senses and to engage Christians’ hearts and minds.5 Catholics continued to trust in the sacred power of images and relics. During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cultic use of images – the veneration of paintings and sculptures of Christ and the saints – flourished throughout Catholic Europe.6 No Protestant image – not even a miraculous portrait of Luther – was a place of holy presence akin to the Jesuit reliquary examined in this volume by Mia Mochizuki.7 Yet Catholic belief in immanence, in the intermingling of the spiritual and material, always coexisted with scepticism about the value of the visual. Catholic reform, from the late Middle Ages onwards, emphasized the importance of inner contemplation.8 During the sixteenth century Catholic commentators wrote, like their Lutheran counterparts, of images’ pedagogical value and affective potential.9 In the seventeenth century new devotional practices encouraged meditation on images as well as texts, and spread amongst Protestants as well as Catholics.10 In this volume, these new devotional practices provide the backdrop for Bridget Heal's investigation of the later history of Lucas Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece, and for Christine Göttler's analysis of the Catholic Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria's religious patronage. What of the visual cultures that evolved across Protestant Europe? Lutherans, driven by their desire to distinguish themselves from radical iconoclasts, allowed many images to survive intact and in situ in churches. They were convinced that God's Word would triumph over idolatry and superstition.11 Luther and his fellow Wittenberg reformers made extensive use of visual propaganda and illustrated key religious texts (the Bible and catechism, most notably), a reflection of their belief in the value of seeing for acquiring religious knowledge and understanding. The copious religious output of the Cranach workshop – altarpieces, epitaphs, portraits and prints – defined Lutheran visual culture for much of the sixteenth century, in Germany and beyond. Elsewhere – in Swiss and Southern German cities during the 1520s and 1530s, in France and in the Northern Netherlands – Protestantism's relationship with art was much more strongly shaped by iconoclasm. Yet memories of recent destruction did not prevent the production of new objects and images. In Calvinist churches Protestantism redirected rather than removed congregations’ desires to adorn and to commemorate.12 The domestic use of religious imagery also continued. Even in Reformed areas – for example in seventeenth-century Zürich, examined here by Andrew Morrall – religious iconographies were used in the home to foster a sense of confessional consciousness.13 The nature of these Protestant visual cultures – the position of art during and after iconoclasm – is an important theme of this volume. Christopher Wood has suggested that ‘Protestant iconophobia … permanently affected the ways in which images were made, exhibited and judged’. He writes of the ‘insulating strategies’ devised by artists in order to avoid charges of idolatry.14 In terms of medium, Protestants tended to favour black and white prints over sculptures and brightly coloured paintings that might seduce the eye. The 1519 woodcut known as Karlstadt's Wagen (wagon), analyzed here in an essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks, and the seventeenth-century Tischzucht (table discipline) broadsheets examined by Morrall exemplify this tendency. In terms of content, Protestant art is most readily associated with polemic, pedagogy, and allegory, and, in the case of the Northern Netherlands, with landscape, still life and everyday scenes filled with moralizing content. Regarding style, Protestant artists supposedly strove for plainness, for a visual culture ‘stripped of conspicuous artifice and deceptive pictorial rhetoric’.15 Here recent scholarship on Cranach is key: Joseph Koerner, for example, has argued that the art produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son in the service of the Lutheran Reformation deliberately eschewed aesthetic pleasure and affective power in favour of communicating evangelical doctrine.16 He speaks of the ‘mortification of painting though text, gesture, and style’.17 But not all religious art was polemical; not all religious art defended itself, as much of Cranach's did, from its enemies, the iconoclasts. Iconoclasm does not, Shira Brisman argues here, help us to read graphic studies of the period. Brisman asks us to dismiss iconoclasm from the privileged position that it has held in studies of sixteenth-century art. We need, she suggests, to erase our knowledge of images’ fall from grace in order to understand the works of Albrecht Dürer and others. Iconoclasm also played remarkably little part in the story of Lucas Cranach the Elder's first evangelical altarpiece, installed in the parish church in Schneeberg in 1539 and eventually, after a traumatic interlude during the Thirty Years’ War, reset in a magnificent baroque frame in the eighteenth century. The creators of some images certainly did respond to contemporary fear of the ‘uncontrolled nature of iconic representation’:18 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt's Wagen, for example, in which Cranach's woodcut images are overburdened with explanatory texts. Others, however, continued to rely on very different modes of viewing: on ambiguity, as with Sebald Beham's small engraving of Moses and Aaron examined by Mitchell Merback; or on the restrained use of the imagination, as with Jan van Goyen's skyscapes, analyzed by Amy Powell. Their creators seem to have recognized, as Dürer did, that ‘pictures are, at best, mediators, affecting without determining what their viewers see in them’.19 The supposed bifurcation between a Protestant aesthetic of plainness and a Catholic effusion of colour and ornament can be seen by juxtaposing Morrall's Tischzucht prints with Mochizuki's seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary. Yet it leaves in interpretative limbo the baroque incarnation of the Lutheran Schneeberg Altarpiece, which presents its central Cranach crucifixion panel as a relic, held aloft by angels and encased within an elaborately carved and gilded frame. This special issue brings together art historians and historians to consider the relationship between art and religious reform. The divisions between disciplines are no longer rigid, as they were in the days when Aby Warburg established his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Historians make effective use of visual and material evidence (though perhaps still not as often as they might); art historians ground their work in detailed historical understanding. For both, the Reformation, with its image disputes and iconoclasm, has acted as an intellectual lodestone since the 1960s.20 The essays assembled in this volume show how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become, but highlight the healthy plurality of methodological approaches that the religious art of the early modern era continues to inspire. Some of these essays tie images firmly to the religious, social and political contexts in which they were produced and received, reconstructed through close readings of texts. Others focus their attention primarily on images’ non-verbal means of communication, suggesting that the power of art can never be fully captured through words. Brisman's and Powell's essays in particular invite us to pay proper attention to artistic processes and to art's tendency to develop through visual conversations. They remind us that art, like music, requires us to exercise our historical imaginations differently.21 The volume has been timed to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, yet Martin Luther himself is more or less absent from its pages. He appears in the analysis of Karlstadt's Wagen, but he did not design this first piece of Reformation visual propaganda. He appears in Merback's discussion of Beham's 1526 engraving, but his thought does not explain the iconography. His theology offered a qualified endorsement of religious images, but cannot account for the flourishing of Lutheran art in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At a moment at which twenty-first-century anniversary culture celebrates ‘The Reformation’, focusing its attention on a particular date and on a particular man, this volume does the opposite. It adopts a broad chronology, ranging from the first decade of reform, the dawn of a new era in northern Europe, through the confessional age to the early eighteenth century. Three essays focus on the period of Umbruch – upheaval – during the early Reformation; five move into the seventeenth century, juxtaposing Protestant with Catholic, Lutheran Saxony and Reformed Zürich with Bavaria and the Jesuits’ overseas missions. These later essays show that although images played an important role in creating confessional consciousness, devotional art did not simply reflect theological divisions. It crossed confessional borders, and also evoked much broader cultural landscapes, landscapes that were being transformed during the early modern period by historical forces other than religion. The essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks that opens this collection focuses on a woodcut produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Wittenberg colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (see plate 1, page 258–259). It was almost certainly the first piece of visual propaganda for the Reformation, produced in January 1519 at a moment at which the evangelical movement was still finding its way. It is a fascinating image: it draws on well-established visual formulae to present a procession of figures, and prefigures later Lutheran propaganda in its use of binary opposition and mockery. Its design is, however, overly complex. Its images are hard to make out because of the abundance of texts, and these texts are hard to decipher and understand. The woodcut was so cryptic, in fact, that Karlstadt had to produce a lengthy written tract to explain it to his supporters. Despite its apparently sequential structure, the woodcut was intended to be read, Roper and Spinks argue, not as a polemical narrative but as part of a devotional exercise. Karlstadt's written explanation suggests that he intended it to be used as a series of discrete points for meditation, as an invitation to reflect on key aspects of Augustinian theology. The woodcut is also intriguing because it was produced at a moment at which the early evangelical movement was still coloured by mystical piety, before the rupture between Luther and the more radical reformers – the Schwärmer or fanatics, as he labelled them – that shaped the 1520s so decisively. Karlstadt himself went on to publish, in 1522, the first evangelical defence of iconoclasm, On the Removal of Images. The 1519 woodcut provides, therefore, vivid testimony of the extent to which iconoclasts understood the religious and psychological power of images. It helps us to understand why image makers became image breakers. Hans Sebald Beham's 1526 Moses and Aaron, examined in Mitchell Merback's essay, is a very different type of image, one of the small-scale engravings for which the Beham brothers were famous (see plate 1, page 288). It is labelled with MOSE and AARON, and signed and dated, but that is all: it suffers from none of the textual overburdening of Karlstadt's Wagen. It shows two half-length figures seated on a mountainside with an open codex on their laps and the blank stone tablets of the Law resting beside them. The image's narrative and its doctrinal message resist easy interpretation, but this time such an opacity is intentional. Merback situates the engraving in the context of the debates about Mosaic Law that followed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, at a time when the split between the Wittenberg theologians and radicals such as Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer had become irrevocable. The engraving was also, however, he suggests, a personal reflection on religious exile, on Beham's own experiences as a ‘non-aligned evangelical’ who had been expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, and labelled a ‘godless painter’. The image testifies to Beham's familiarity with Lutheran teachings on the relationship between the Law and Gospel. But Luther's writings – even his 1525 sermon How Christians Should Regard Moses – offer no simple key for its interpretation. Rather, the artist produced his own reading, an allegory of the parting of ways between the Lutherans and Spiritualists. The priestly Aaron reads the codex before him while Moses, the lawgiver in Luther's interpretation, gazes out, seeking illumination beyond the Word. Beham has, Merback suggests, ‘subtly reasserted the hero's prophetic vocation and charisma’. The image can be read as veiled polemic against Wittenberg, or perhaps as a warning to both sides at a time of discord. Both of these first essays explore the relationship between image and word. The visual cannot, it seems, be reduced to an expression of the verbal, even in the case of Karlstadt's Wagen, with its inscriptions and detailed they are to with their must be allowed to for as Lutheran Shira Brisman's essay on graphic studies made the time of the Reformation these in a very different The she suggests, prophetic of the destruction that images during the most of But we resist seeing them as and iconoclasm from the of Christ's with a piece of and of the Christ with a beside it (see plate 1, page and plate page that cannot be in words. We see Brisman as of a visual that the through a of Images she suggests, their own the by the of the artist to to resist the narrative by or we might by and engravings such as examined by Spinks and we a different type of interpretative – one that not, as for Sebald from to the of the Reformation, but rather from the artistic processes of the While the first essays in very different art's role at the of a new the two us into the confessional Bridget Heal's essay focuses on Lutheran on a Protestant in from the early of the Reformation the eighteenth century, religious art It examines Cranach's Schneeberg and its This has a it was installed in 1539 but by during the Thirty Years’ Its were in Schneeberg in but the was in when the church was were in a and frame that in situ (see plate 1, page The Protestant of which the is a example, our of Lutheran art. Heal's the within the context of two broader the of Lutheran confessional and the of Lutheran piety. in particular the importance of historical not for the image's original and but also for its The of the made use of the visual of the baroque – perhaps not the cultural of the It also, however, a understanding of images’ devotional a new perhaps to them a role in the by which the intellectual (the knowledge of became the affective presence in the Protestants the with Cranach's image through the of and dramatic Andrew Morrall's essay us to Zürich, to a very different religious Morrall his discussion a painting of the of a Hans seated at a The of and a life are here in the of the and and in the domestic that them. The painting Morrall an expression of a Protestant and was part of a broader visual of Tischzucht that to the Morrall also explores the of of the of images by the for Protestantism he suggests, an It the of art, made it and and stripped it of or was by its to and its The images used by Morrall in the to by Brisman – for the image is a message must be out through In Zürich the Reformation brought he suggests, the of images. In the seventeenth-century art flourished in the of iconoclasm, as Amy shows in discussion of the paintings of Jan van argues that of iconoclasm, its of and in the works examined here and in like them. explores van Goyen's his use of and which did not, as art of the period did, filled with like the on the in church a of images that never fully These suggests, be seen as images of the by as to In a however, artistic had to be with – van who van Goyen's in him for not far from the Goyen's paintings were also – he is thought to have been a Catholic, but his works across the confessional responses to iconoclasm have been in through the of church and through the analysis of the religious and of and Here adopts a different one that art recent in and in the found in and early modern art. she van Goyen's of a particular she also against a that images within their historical brings seventeenth-century painting into with modern art, in particular to the use of which later played a role in of Here van Goyen's paintings from their own time and themselves to the With Christine Göttler's essay we move to a Catholic to the Bavaria of the Duke Wilhelm V examines the and the and cultural of within an Catholic focuses on the that the at his and and on a series of engravings of by Jan and that were to Bavaria's and made extensive use of images, and to their and religious from the to the The examined here however, a It not on but on reform, on on or from the – a for the after his in This by the but it was to move beyond confessional It in some Despite the that the on and the was in the at for example, were and that sacred scenes or They suggests, to the that to the religious of the The of the of the religious was key to both Protestant and Catholic reform, but in Duke and it was to be through In the essay of the volume Mia a detailed of one particular a Portuguese reliquary from the of the seventeenth century (see plate 1, page Here the of Catholicism that were present in Göttler's of into a account of the importance of overseas and for early modern religious At the of Mochizuki's reliquary is a of the from in the that the with them on their missions. It is in a that was to and and evoked The image is in this with of It is, suggests, seeking to through its of sacred It is an through its and its brings together two that of the of Western Christendom and the polemical that and that of with the The essay us that while iconoclasm did, without the ways in which religious images were made, exhibited and received, image or also a much cultural In his Joseph the essays within this volume in a broad The Protestant Reformation of merely one in the history of iconoclasm, a history that to the present art to both image making and image how and why iconoclasm to be accorded an important place within the history of art. he a tendency – certainly in this volume – to focus not on of destruction but rather on the in their It was the of iconoclasm that the attention of social history and art history during the and however, against the backdrop of image in and we seem more by the ways in which early modern cultures – both Protestant and Catholic – responded to the of iconoclasm, and were transformed by the that it The workshop that to this special issue was by the and the are very for the also to for to the for their help and and above all to for the

Reviewed by: Polygamy: An Early American History by Sarah M. S. Pearsall Lindsay M. Keiter Polygamy: An Early American History. By Sarah M. S. Pearsall. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. 415 pages. Cloth, ebook. Sarah M. S. Pearsall's sweeping analysis of plural marriages, Polygamy: An Early American History, digs deep into conflicts over marital practices throughout the North American continent and the British Atlantic from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Polygamy, she shows, has long been misconstrued in the past and present as being about lust and sex. Like any form of marriage, polygamy was about power, both public and private, giving intimate decisions and behaviors political significance. She argues that in a variety of contexts, "plural unions marked status for men, and to a lesser degree [the] wives in them, and women's work palpably supported and augmented men's status" (140). She demonstrates how theological and intellectual conflicts over polygamy, well before the emergence of Mormonism, were central to debates about the structure and strength of both righteous households and enlightened nations. Her diverse examples of plural marriage practices in early America collectively demonstrate how the imposition of monogamy was—and is—a legacy of colonialism. This is a remarkable work of synthesis, encompassing an enormous geographic and chronological sweep. Pearsall makes creative use of a wide variety of sources to flesh out the stories of people whose voices were recorded in fragments, if at all, thereby centering the perspectives and experiences of the women and men deliberately marginalized in the historical record. Pearsall often compensates for the scarcity of direct testimony by creatively mining other sources, as when she devotes multiple pages to analyzing phrases about love and lust in Algonquin dictionaries to contextualize what polygamy may have meant for Makheabichtichiou, an Algonquian leader, and his three wives. As a whole, Pearsall's effort to question the "inherited and too often unquestioned structures of marriage, gender, and sexuality," as well as "notions of simple progress" (294), results in a beautifully and sensitively written book. The first three chapters explore conflicts between Indigenous people and European colonizers in the seventeenth century. Ironically, the effects of colonialism—labor reorganization and demographic disaster—made plural marriages more important as symbol and strategy for Indigenous political elites. Pearsall begins in New Spain, considering how plural marriage "was a symbol, a practice, and a rallying cry" (23) in both the 1597 Guale Rebellion in Florida and the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico. In the 1630s, she then travels to the chillier climes of French Canada, where, to the delight of Jesuits, Makheabichtichiou—"'capitaine' of la Petite Nation" [End Page 418] (50)—enthusiastically embraced Christianity, renouncing the customs the Jesuits condemned, save one. The missionaries' hopes were blasted by Makheabichtichiou's refusal—or inability—to renounce two of his three wives. Though polygyny was a political choice that enhanced men's power, Pearsall argues that Makheabichtichiou's hands were tied when two of his wives refused to be baptized or to leave his household, revealing how "even a powerful leader was still constrained by larger structures of households, economies, and kinship" (71). Pearsall next moves eastward to consider how, amid the upheaval of King Philip's War, Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative offers "a remarkable window onto Native practices of plural marriage and domestic life" (104). Rowlandson's captor Weetamoo (sachem of the Pocasset) was the third wife of the Narragansett sachem—a choice that "suggests a level of diplomatic desperation, as well as a possible willingness to sacrifice herself for her people" (105). Weetamoo was a critical ally of Metacom, also known as King Philip, and she was his sister-in-law twice over (Weetamoo's first husband was Metacom's brother, and Metacom married Weetamoo's sister). Within this context, polygamy emerges as a tactic of political alliance and survival in a society under enormous strain, and "Weetamoo's flashpoints of fury [toward Rowlandson] illuminate the cracks that threaten to split her world apart" (105). Thus, in these very different contexts, Pearsall argues convincingly that polygamy was not a static practice but was instead shaped by the demographic disaster and labor reorganization that resulted...

Few aspects of American history have gone through as rapid a transformation as Native American history during the past generation. In the not too distant past scholars, including many anthropologists, wrote accounts of particular Indian ‘tribes’. Many of these works, which were often quite sympathetic to their subject, concentrated on politics and wars. Beginning in the late 1960s, historians, anthropologists, and those calling themselves ‘ethnohistorians’ began to bring new perspectives to the subject. To date, many of the most important studies focus on the period before 1850. Taken together, these works testify to the fundamental importance of understanding the histories of indigenous peoples in the Americas. In recent years, scholarship about Native Americans has boomed. The cluster of six articles here suggests the range of work being done in the field. Nicholas Rosenthal provides an overview of some of the major developments and Joshua Piker offers a penetrating view of the concept of race and how it has shaped our understanding of Native peoples in early America. Ruth Spack’s short essay on American Indian schooling reveals a shift in the history of education based on the incorporation of indigenous perspectives. Tyler Boulware investigates the notion of national identity and its application for Native peoples. Dixie Ray Haggard’s perceptive piece offers nothing less than a major revision of scholars’ understanding of the Yamasee War of the 1710s, an event that played a pivotal role in the southeast during the eighteenth century. Finally, Steven Hackel and Anne Reid reveal the benefits of electronic publication. Their essay on the Early California Population Project provides insight into a major database housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, a project now available to scholars that will revolutionize our understanding the period from the 1760s to the midnineteenth century. The full cluster is made up of the following articles:

Reviewed by: Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater Peter P. Reed (bio) Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater. Jason Shaffer. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007 264 pp. Jason Shaffer’s Performing Patriotism, a study of American theatre’s Atlantic genealogies, returns to the archives to recover the complexities of early American stage and performance practices. By Shaffer’s account, early American theatre—focused on the revivals and influences of traditional British offerings such as Joseph Addison’s Cato, Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved, and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer— looks distinctly and deliberately un-American. Shaffer, however, sees the Anglo-Atlantic tones of early American performance not as evidence of national underdevelopment but as an opportunity to examine the collaborative, constructed, and contingent aspects of American identities. Even before William Dunlap’s 1830 history of American theatre, observers had alternately bemoaned and celebrated the ever delayed-but-inevitable emergence [End Page 734] of American theatre as a national(istic) cultural institution. Less concerned with the origins of an emergent American theatre, Shaffer demonstrates that even at a moment of national political origins, the practices of a national theatrical imaginary happily recycled, revised, and reinvented the materials bequeathed by English theatre. Shaffer formulates national identity as a constantly shifting process of restaging and revising the performative relics of the circum-Atlantic world. Roots matter, but culture’s routes—a concept early American theatre history seems uniquely able to comment upon—emerge as the study’s dominant theme. American theatre, and even Americanness itself, becomes a matter of genre, of the constant repetition and revision of circulating performances. This process continues today, Shaffer contends, and early American theatre remains important not as a static originary point for American culture, but because it transmits forward (even to Mel Gibson’s 2000 blockbuster film The Patriot) the perdurable processes of mythmaking and identity-rehearsal occurring on the northwestern edges of the Anglophone circum-Atlantic world. Shaffer selects his sampling of early American dramas not by their supposed “American” qualities but by their popularity and frequency, avoiding the teleological and tautological problems of earlier American theatre histories. Formal rather than chronological organization foregrounds theatre’s overlapping survivals and substitutions rather than linear historical progressions. Shaffer’s discussion of Addison’s Cato, for example, moves deftly from script to staging to offstage reprisals of the roles, gleaning a powerful sense of “collective improvisation” from multiple and multivalent deployments of the play. Subsequent chapters treat other under-examined forms of performance, including colonial college theatre, revolutionary propaganda plays, and post-Revolutionary comedy. The sequence has its logic, as dramas shifted from cagey analogy to outright propaganda. Although the book rarely relies on easy linear narratives of historical developments, it does leave an impression of American theatre as increasingly engaging its immediate cultural contexts. Performing Patriotism serves at least three masters, contributing to related conversations in Atlantic cultural history, early American literary studies, and theatre and performance history. Shaffer’s study represents the still-debated Atlantic and cultural turns in American history, examining the cultural representations of political expression and national identity. Despite [End Page 735] engaging some polarizing issues in early American history (the possible “Anglicization” of American culture and the nature of early American governance), Shaffer understands that the broad array of evidence indicates multiple, simultaneous, and competing deployments of English performances. To its credit, the study avoids the oversimplification of claiming one simple political or cultural function of theatre. Shaffer’s study, especially its treatment of the relationships among theatrical conventions and print culture, also engages literary scholarship in early American print performance culture such as Jay Fliegelman’s Declaring Independence, Sandra M. Gustafson’s Eloquence Is Power, Christopher Looby’s Voicing America, and Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic. Shaffer’s study can provide early American literary scholars an expanded picture of the early American relationships between texts, manuscripts, material culture, and ephemeral performances. Performing Patriotism speaks most directly to recent work in performance studies and American theatre history, which shares many of these concerns. Developing the performance-studies notion that the ritualized, scripted, and re-enacted qualities of theatre...

The Seeds of Divergence: The Economy of French North America, 1688 to 1760

Reviewed by: The Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary, Queen of Scots: The Earl of Argyll and the Struggle for Britain and Ireland James Kirk The Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary, Queen of Scots: The Earl of Argyll and the Struggle for Britain and Ireland. By Jane E. A. Dawson. [Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xvii, 251.) The title is lengthy but the subject is significant. Dr. Dawson's central theme is the career of the fifth earl of Argyll, who exercised a strategic role in securing a Protestant victory at the Scottish Reformation. He not only helped shape the shared Protestant allegiance within the two kingdoms on the British mainland but supported English efforts at controlling Ireland. Highland chieftain, Protestant reformer, and supporter of John Knox, Argyll succeeded to the earldom in 1558, and followed his father's example in promoting Protestantism within his domains and beyond with evangelical zeal. He grew up in a household whose Protestant chaplains were renegade Catholic clerics, John Douglas, a former friar, and notably John Carswell, a former priest and later superintendent of Argyll, who, with Argyll's patronage, furthered the work of the Reformed church in the west Highlands. As a leading magnate, Argyll held key offices of state: justice-general, master of the royal household, and ultimately the prized post of chancellor. Geographically, his power-base lay in the west Highlands and islands where he commanded the necessary military and naval resources enabling him to intervene [End Page 817] in Ireland. Besides, within Scotland, he effortlessly straddled the cultural divide and was as readily at home in the Scots-speaking Lowlands as he was in his Gaelic-speaking heartland. He became one of the most powerful figures not only in Scotland but in the whole of Britain. Joining the Protestant "lords of the Congregation," he took a lead in overthrowing, with English help, the regime of Mary of Guise, governor of Scotland for her daughter Mary, queen of Scots, then absent in France. Even so, as brother-in-law to Mary, he became a member of the royal circle when Mary, who remained a Catholic, returned home in 1561. That may appear incongruous, for Argyll was also one of the nobles who had been particularly active in destroying "idolatrous" images in churches and in demolishing friaries. At the Reformation parliament in 1560, he had been prominent in promoting the legislation abrogating papal jurisdiction in Scotland and forbidding the celebration of Mass. As part of the deal, Mary was obliged to support Protestantism publicly while maintaining a priest for her own private devotions at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. At the same time, Argyll came to an understanding with Sir William Cecil in England, Queen Elizabeth's secretary, whom he met in Edinburgh, to promote a shared Protestantism within the three kingdoms of the British Isles. Argyll's promise of assistance in northern Ireland was welcomed by the English government as part of its plans for subjugating Ulster. Five years later, however, Argyll withdrew his offer of co-operation. When Mary married Darnley, her second husband, Argyll had temporarily lost power, and he blamed Elizabeth for her failure to send help to Scotland. Consequently, any belief he had in a common cause evaporated. By 1567, he accepted the need to imprison Mary after her defeat in battle, but he could not condone her enforced abdication. He refused to attend the coronation of Mary's infant son and continued to support the queen's party, commanding her forces at the battle of Langside in 1568 before her flight to England. Under pressure from his clan council, however, he changed sides and finally joined the supporters of young King James. To some degree, he served as a peacemaker and tried to reconcile his former allies to the government of King James. He died in 1573 as the dust of the civil war between supporters of Mary and King James began to settle. Dr. Dawson is to be congratulated for her well-researched and masterly study of Argyll as a 'British' statesman, exploring his triple role as Gaelic chief, Scottish statesman, and British...

On 20 September 2014, in the wake of the Scottish Independence Referendum, the pro-union, right-wing British broadsheet The Daily Telegraph’ s front page was dominated by a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II in the grounds of her Balmoral Estate in the Scottish Highlands, under the headline ‘Queen’s pledge to help reunite the Kingdom’. This article takes the headline as a departure point through which to explore competing discourses of national identity during the Independence Referendum. Understanding the Queen’s body as a site of symbolic struggle over these discourses, this article undertakes visual analysis to unpack the composition of the photograph, in order to understand its social, historical, political and cultural meanings. In so doing, it argues that the use of ‘Queen of Scots’ in The Daily Telegraph at the specific conjunctural moment of the Scottish Independence Referendum reveals the complex intersections between monarchy, power, (geo)politics, symbolism, sovereignty, national identity/identities and landscape in the United Kingdom.

Cultural Formations in Colonial North America and the Early National United States Jeffrey H. Richards Jason Shaffer , Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Pp. 230.$45.00. Cynthia A. Kierner , The Contrast: Manners, Morals, and Authority in the Early American Republic (New York: New York University Press, 2007). Pp. x, 145. $60.00. Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan , Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Pp. xiv, 239. $59.95. Bryan Waterman , Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Pp. xv, 318. $55.00. The establishment of an intellectual and artistic culture in the British colonies of North America and postwar new republic of the United States has been the subject, in constituent parts, of a number of studies in the last decade, the books under review among them. Scholars have long found the American Revolution a rich source of historical interest; more recently, the 1790s have drawn the attention of cultural historians. Together, the period from 1750 to 1800 constitutes not merely the founding of the British American polity but also a period of cultural experimentation that laid the grounds for future cultural developments. But in many ways, these periods, for the past and recent investigation, still remain not fully known. And if none of the books being considered here shocks with surprising revelations, each in its own way offers up information and insights into sometimes familiar, sometimes obscure situations and personages that in the accumulation urge scholars of the American eighteenth century to explain in even greater detail what this confusing, radical, reactionary, sanguinary, exhilarating half-century was truly about. [End Page 462] One difficulty facing all scholars of the period is determining what constitutes an American culture. Neither the Stamp Act riots, nor the Boston Massacre, the Declaration of Independence, nor even the inauguration of George Washington as the first president under the new constitution specifically delimits the beginning of an intellectual and artistic heritage that can be claimed to be specifically American. The long shadow of colonialism extended well past these signpost events, past Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, Edwin Forrest and Margaret Fuller, at least into the 1860s, when an aging Nathaniel Hawthorne struggled with three incomplete novels about Americans recovering an English past, and thus, a vestigial British identity. Nevertheless, writers, artists, actors, and orators on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that the North American colonies were not Great Britain, as much as some colonials tried to emulate English squires and at certain moments declared the differences to be stark and clear. The truth is, however, that colonials-turned-citizens of the United States often wanted it both ways, an identity that declared the specificity of residence in the New World within a broader framework of transatlantic circulation and exchange. Americanness could be performed, it seemed, as a way of trying out certain attitudes and behaviors—republican simplicity and restraint, for instance—and as a playacting upon the theater of the world, where individuals and nations postured and gestured for places on the macrocosmic stage before global audiences. That consciousness of acting before the eyes of the world had a long history in colonial North America, but as Jason Shaffer reiterates in his fine new study, Performing Patriotism, it became especially acute during the long Revolutionary period when professional theater itself found a place in the colonial landscape. For Shaffer, the linkage of the political and theatrical generates expression of a rising American nationalism within the context of an imported cultural frame. As he points out, the "appropriations of texts, both theatrical and polemical, helped to generate an American nationalism that used British culture against itself, invoking both the cultural affinity between the two nations and their irreconcilable political differences" (7). In Shaffer's view, a touchstone play like Joseph Addison's Cato, long known as a Washington favorite, carries with it complex associations and registers of political position when transplanted to a New World setting and...

A Contribution to the Morphometrical Study of Cattle in Colonial North America

<i>Phillip H. Round</i> Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880<i>Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880</i>. Phillip H. Round. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 1–282.

Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750

DESPITE GARY B. NASH'S 1974 INSISTENCE THAT DISCUSSIONS OF EARLY America include red, white, and black, for the next fifteen years early American history and the history of American Indians during the colonial period remained, for the most part, separate literatures. (1) A generation ago the historical literature on Indians also followed fairly stark regional differentiations based on both cultural/linguistic groups and colonial jurisdictions. Not only were Spanish Florida and French Louisiana historiographically separate from the southern English colonies, but the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry were as well, with each of those coastal regions separated from its backcountry. Such divisions reflected the fact that some colonial boundaries roughly followed political and cultural parameters of the Indian nations among whom the Europeans colonized. (2) French, Spanish, and English source materials lie in different countries' archives, written in different languages. English colonial sources are further dispersed into state and local archives. Despite the ready availability of Spanish accounts (in both Spanish and English) of sixteenth-century entradas--as well as of sources for late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century contact between English colonists and Algonquian Indians at Roanoke and in the Chesapeake--for much of the interior South and the Lowcountry, the period between the Spanish entradas of the sixteenth and the return of European explorers and traders in the late seventeenth constituted a lost century for historians. Clearly enormous changes took place during that century, but the nature of those changes remained obscure. The lack of European written sources to describe the interior of the continent during those hundred years left traditional historians at a loss to explain how the interior Southeast at the start of the eighteenth seemed completely transformed from the one described by sixteenth-century Spanish explorers. English writers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries trying to understand the shifting Indian demographic and political maps often found themselves baffled, which did nothing to help twentieth-century historians reading them. (3) During the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, early American Indian history (much of it focused on the Chesapeake and New England) emphasized the violence of Europeans in their encounter with Indians. Francis Jennings demanded in 1975 that we understand the colonial period as a story of conquest. (4) In 1983 Richard White argued in The Roots of Dependency that Euro-Indian relations in various parts of North America had in common the attempt ... by whites to bring Indian resources, land, and labor into the market. (5) Although White scrutinized Choctaw motives and agency, his argument, as his title suggests, stresses Indians' ultimate dependency on economic forces they did not control. Much of the work on southeastern Indians since then has continued grappling with the questions he raised. The separation of early American history from the history of American Indians (and early Americanists' inattention not only to American Indian historiography but also to Indians in their own source material) provoked calls during the late 1980s from James Axtell and James H. Merrell for colonial historians to recognize the central place of American Indians in the history of English colonies. (6) J. Frederick Fausz's work on the merging and emerging worlds of European colonists and Indians in the Chesapeake illustrates the integration of Indian and colonial politics. His 1988 article published in a volume aimed at colonial (rather than Indian) historians reinforces the point made by Axtell and Merrell. (7) Thereafter, armed with new techniques and questions, many historians in the last two decades have taken up the challenge to integrate American Indian and colonial American history and have done so more fully in the Southeast than elsewhere. …

The Legitimacy of US Administrative Law and the Foundations of English Administrative Law: Setting the Historical Record Straight