The Compiler's Art: Hannah Adams, the Dictionary of All Religions, and the Religious World

Abstract

It may not be much of an overstatement to say that Hannah Adams began her career by marketing the religious world. Often credited by biographers as the first American woman to earn her living by her pen, Adams started writing in response to financial exigencies. Where later women writers turned to fiction or journalism, Adams directed her efforts otherwise: she wrote a reference book. Crouching for hours in bookstores and begging access to the libraries of learned friends, Adams transcribed, excerpted, and edited portions of theological treatises, travel narratives, geographies, and histories into a comprehensive survey of the world’s religions (Schmidt 7). Her labors resulted in the 1784 publication of An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects Which Have Appeared from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day, which would later be reissued in revised form as AView of Religions in 1791 and 1801 and as A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, Jewish, Heathen, Mahometan, and Christian, Ancient and Modern in 1817. Composed of short, synthetic entries, Adams’s book detailed the beliefs and practices of religious subjects on a global scale. The four editions of her work—each bound in a single octavo volume—earned her both public acclaim and, eventually, financial success (Schmidt 43, 51, 115, 295). Contemporaneous newspaper articles and booksellers’ lists referred knowingly to “Miss Adams’ Dictionary” or “Hannah Adams’ Dictionary” as a source for knowledge about the world’s religions; these works, along with her other histories, were read widely enough that one reviewer of the