Early American Literature

Caroline Wigginton and Abram Van Engen, editors of Feeling Godly: Religious Affections and Christian Contact in Early North America, invite scholars from the fields of history, religious studies, English, Native [End Page 776] American and Indigenous Studies, and Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese studies to think together about "the way emotional communities defined, regulated, and produced religious affections" (13). In four sets of paired chapters, one scholar offers a distinctive case study, while a second takes up some aspect of the ideas and evidence the initial scholar presents. This is a book to be contemplated rather than summarized; as its editors note, the intent is to open conversations. Feeling Godly should succeed in that and succeed as well in reminding scholars of early America that the past, like the present, is made of love and terror, pleasure and hope.

It's easier to enjoy a lively, loosely connected set of essays than it is to write an introduction for one. Wigginton and Van Engen explain the intricacies of the volume's ambitions and organization: they are drawing on "theories of the religious and the history of emotions, focusing in particular on the concept of emotional communities," while taking a "comparative approach" in order to "draw together microhistorical moments of encounter with and between Christians spread across time and space in early North America" (16). "Our four centers of attention," they go on to explain, "pair into two different types of study:" "theories, definitions, and linguistic barriers" and "dreams, visions, and experiences that often grasp at language" (17, 19). The editors also acknowledge, at some length, the difficulty of defining either "religious" or "affections." It's a fair-minded and historiographically generous introduction, but—and this is a testament to the volume the editors have assembled, rather than a criticism of it—it does leave the reader eager simply to get on with things. And get on with things the essay authors do.

Mark Valeri offers a riveting, historiographically bold analysis of Jonathan Edwards's theory of the "relationship among affections, dispositions, and volition" (40). Valeri persuasively describes the intellectual and affective elements of Edwards's worldview. He deems Edwards's framework "a rather powerful example of how evangelicals could use the language of freedom and choice" (43) and suggests that it influenced revolutionary critiques of British authority. Joanna Brooks, writing with startling verve (though given that it's Joanna Brooks, we probably shouldn't be startled) posits that the revivals Edwards described and defended were awash in emotion not only because of the influences Valeri so effectively limns but also because personal intimacy and relationships made meaning out of the chaos of early modern colonial life. The second set of essays continues [End Page 777] close attention to language: Scott Manning Stevens discusses the probable effect that "radical linguistic alterity" had on both Catholic and Protestant evangelization of Indigenous peoples in New England and throughout the Haudenosaunee homelands. Missionaries' ability to bear witness was constrained by their inability truly to see the practices, beliefs, and emotions of the people on whom they'd descended. Stevens's points are not novel. He has also persuasively explored them elsewhere, and he graciously acknowledges the work of Micah True; works including Tracy Leavelle's The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (U of Pennsylvania P, 2011) also come to mind. Nonetheless, Stevens's essay and Caroline Wigginton's response together offer a sophisticated, accessible meditation on the many illegibilities of Indigenous communities to Christian missionaries and on the further illegibilities of that unstable, violent world to the scholars who analyze it.

The final two sets of essays leave New England far behind. Melissa Frost brings us vivid accounts of women in New Spain who used Nahuatl herbs to induce hallucinatory experiences that they interpreted in great measure through Catholic teachings and symbols. Mind-altering drugs, Frost smartly observes, are emotion...