Portable Lives: Reformed Artisans and Refined Materials in the Refugee Atlantic

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Art

This contribution focuses on early modern refugee artisans, and their families, who engaged actively with print culture while cobbling together spiritual ideas, natural philosophies, local scientific knowledge, and dexterous craft skills during the earliest years of the industrial revolution. It provides a “deep” history of the little-known entrepreneur Jacques Fontaine (1658–1728), a Huguenot refugee. Together with his wife and sister-in-law, Fontaine invented a small fire machine to produce a cheap imitation-silk finish on a common woolen textile. Fontaine’s experiences working with this commodity embody the crucial strategy of the so-called New Luxuries. This beacme a mainstay of the vast majority of highly skilled refugee Huguenot artisans scattered throughout the Atlantic after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), who elevated local materials of little intrinsic worth to successfully imitate more desirable, expensive, and polite imported goods of greater intrinsic value, while jumpstarting the early industrial and consumer revolutions.

Protestant Empires

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020 · 4 citations

• Sociology
• Art history
• Sociology

Protestantism during the early modern period is still predominantly presented as a European story. Advancing a novel framework to understand the nature and impact of the Protestant Reformations, this volume brings together leading scholars to substantially integrate global Protestant experiences into accounts of the early modern world created by the Reformations, to compare Protestant ideas and practices with other world religions, to chart colonial politics and experiences, and to ask how resulting ideas and identities were negotiated by Europeans at the time. Through its wide geographical and chronological scope, Protestant Empires advances a new approach to understanding the Protestant Reformations. Showcasing selective model approaches on how to think anew, and pointing the way towards a multi-national and connected account of the Protestant Reformations, this volume demonstrates how global interactions and their effect on Europe have played a crucial role in the history of the 'long Reformation' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

For a Short Time Only: Itinerants and the Resurgence of Popular Culture in Early America

Journal of American History · 2017-09-07 · 1 citations

Peter Benes is the longtime director of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife. His aim in this entertaining and painstakingly researched book is to show how migration, itinerancy, and the diffusion of European popular culture in early America were intertwined. “Strolling” work meant “amusements and the ‘minor’ arts,” from puppetry and acrobatics to waxworks (p. 6). Itinerant-taught “mannered or schooled culture,” such as psalmody and penmanship, is also included (ibid., emphasis in original). The focus is on biographies of individual travelers. Following the Swedish folklorist Carl W. von Sydow and the cultural historian Peter Burke, Benes identifies immigrants as “active bearers,” “tradition-bearers,” or “carriers” of popular culture, “whose efforts kept alive old practices and introduced new ones among their relatively ‘passive’ audiences” (p. 8). This diffusion model depends on chance, choice, markets, and the Atlantic transit system; so some practices were transmitted and others were not. Some “old practices” declined from the first generation—thus requiring “resurgence”—or were unknown. “Delayed transmission” was common. An entertainment available in England in 1700 might arrive in America a century later with a new troupe of itinerants. Benes devotes chapters to impermanent migration and the ephemeral presence of opportunistic European itinerants who crisscrossed the Atlantic to profit from an absence of competition. Sojourners lingered until local authorities grew intolerant, paying customers dried up, or opportunities arose elsewhere. Benes documents thirty-five itinerant occupations in two useful tables with impressive primary-source data on these skillful wanderers from 1675 to 1836, identifying specialties, places of origin, and travels (pp. 34–35).

<i>The Refiner’s Fire’s</i> Atlantic

Journal of Mormon History · 2015-10-01

Huguenot History as Game of Thrones

Reviews in American History · 2015-06-01

Huguenot History as Game of Thrones Neil Kamil (bio) Geoffrey Treasure. The Huguenots. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. xiv + 480 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. At the large public university where I teach, on the first day of the U.S. survey, 330 students take their seats, most with low expectations. A good number come from small towns where football coaches do double-duty as public school history teachers. This arrangement does not usually engender much love for the discipline. They play a different brand of football in Britain, of course, where Geoffrey Treasure taught history for forty years before retiring as senior master at Harrow—a very different sort of public school, where such aristocratic schoolboys as Byron and Winston Churchill prepared for Oxford and Cambridge. Harrow remains an exclusive boys’ school, and Treasure's “stimulating—though often sobering—experience of form room teaching” (p. xiv) in this rarified place has influenced his prolific historical writing. As The Huguenots—his fifth book on seventeenth-century France—makes clear, it is a good bet that Treasure is a remarkable teacher. His epigrammatic and shrewd writing reveals a formative link to the privileged classrooms where he has spent most of his distinguished career. The Huguenots is a learned synthesis intended for well-informed history buffs who seek a challenging foray into the political, military, and religious history of early-modern French elites. Lay readers with strong interests in the seventeenth-century will find Treasure an enthusiastic storyteller who gets in and out of well-known narratives with style and dispatch. Nevertheless, this is a substantial book that will require much concentrated reading time. It is divided into thirty-eight chapters, few exceeding ten pages, so selective readers can pick and choose. Treasure's format has obvious liabilities, but it emphasizes what successful history teachers at the secondary level learn from “sobering” experience: keep it lively and don't rattle on too long. The lapidary approach to chapters will also please specialists, but for different reasons. Advanced historians of early modern France and the outremer will discover little new here, as they will have read everything in the well-informed and annotated secondary-source bibliography. For them, more [End Page 203] adventurous reading and discussion in other disciplines would enrich this project enormously. However, graduate students who have yet to tackle their comprehensive exams will find several parts of the book useful for preparation, and later too, particularly as they begin lecture-writing. Indeed, even as more Americanists engage avidly with the current growth in French-Atlantic scholarship, the job market softens for historians of seventeenth-century France. This hinders development in both fields. Treasure's formidable knowledge of the historiography and those canonical narratives that early modern French historians have commonly taught in their graduate seminars will therefore prove valuable to a growing number of early American historians. Treasure aims to breathe fresh life into centuries of such familiar stories that revolve around mimetic violence (a term he does not use) between the forces of orthodoxy and heresy framed by the Valois and Bourbon response to the French Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Thus, as Treasure describes it, by the 1530s, Francis I, his monarchy by tradition the guardian of the Gallican Church's imperative to assert independence in French religious and geopolitical interests against what the court perceived to be undue papal influence, “was unimpressed by the actions of his fellow sovereign Henry VIII, which led to a schism and the establishment of an English church under the crown” (p. 23). Francis and his successors knew “[f]rom the way in which monarchy had evolved over the centuries there had come to be a special relationship between church and crown” (p. 23). This meant that despite deep differences with Rome that also stemmed from competition with Spanish or Italian interests and occasional alignment by reason of state with Protestant powers, this “special relationship” would inevitably “determine the Huguenots’ eventual fate. So long as the crown remained Catholic the Huguenot would be more than a heretic,” Treasure writes. “He was guilty of lèse majesté, a rebel” (p. 23). For Treasure then, a “kind of security” (p. 23...

The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England

Journal of American History · 2013-02-15 · 6 citations

Sarah Rivett's ambitious book revisits two enduring subjects: Puritan testimonies of faith and Christian Reformed science. Rivett contextualizes local and transatlantic debates involving London's Royal Society and Massachusetts's ministers and natural philosophers over the legitimacy of divine knowledge ostensibly derived from the invisible sanctum of the soul and documented by ministerial and scientific “experts” who interpreted and transcribed oral testimony. Thus, Rivett updates Max Weber and his followers. “Rather than a grand narrative of the triumph of human learning in a Protestant and then secular age,” she writes, “the science of the soul reveals the limiting factors of human knowledge, the boundaries drawn and redrawn around what humans could know and what they could not know” (p. 25). Any inventory of the canon should mention Robert K. Merton, about whom she is silent, and Charles Webster, whose Great Instauration (1975) shares themes, personnel, and locations. Aligning with Jonathan I. Israel's Radical Enlightenment (2002), Rivett proposes a “new method” to chart Atlantic pluralities “composed, not of universal laws” but “a system of knowledge … [that] … varies according to its spatial specificity” (p. 9n9). Ironically, the local “variant” that Jonathan Edwards “recuperate[s]” by the final chapter is “exceptionalist” America, New England's “grand narrative” (pp. 282–83, 312).

From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina

Journal of American History · 2007-06-01 · 12 citations

Journal Article From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina Get access From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina. By Ruymbeke Bertrand Van. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. xviii, 396 pp. $49.95, isbn1-57003-583-0.) Neil Kamil Neil Kamil University of TexasAustin, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 94, Issue 1, June 2007, Pages 250–251, https://doi.org/10.2307/25094815 Published: 01 June 2007

Of Animal History and Human Cruelty in the New England Tradition

Reviews in American History · 2006-03-01

Jon T. Coleman. Vicious: Wolves and Men in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 288 pp. Notes and index. $20.00. "The Cat doth play, And after slay." —The New England Primer (ca. 1741) Among the unexpected memories of my urban childhood is an unsettling old photograph (ca. 1940) of an Irish barnyard in winter, in which an enormous, wolf-like canine hangs high in a tree like a convicted criminal, with a noose around its neck. Standing below are three men, one holding a rifle: the animal's anonymous executioners. I remember thinking it was a wolf, although I had no idea why it met this gruesome fate. What, after all, could warrant a mere dog to deserve such an elaborate ritual of human punishment? Puppies were commonly culled by hanging in early modern Britain, and the last Canis lupus sighting in Ireland took place in the eighteenth century, so this was almost certainly a dog that ran afoul of vengeful local farmers. Yet this image suggested more than mere culling. Judging from the manpower that attended the event, the violence that clearly occasioned taking the photograph, and the triumphant pose for posterity that it records, it seems that for these three men at least, to parse canines was to assert a distinction without a difference. Whatever maleficium this dog had committed—that is, whatever evil deed had been attributed to it, determining the manner of its death—this was a wolf to them. That I retained such a memory at all caught me by surprise. Wolf sightings in mid-twentieth-century Manhattan were limited to two-legged varieties, so I had forgotten (or happily repressed) this now lost representation of a fragment of the grim reality of pastoral life that was, in any event, far outside of my experience in the big city. Forgotten, that is, until I opened Jon T. Coleman's Vicious, and quickly learned that the wretched animal in my photograph may have been one of the lucky ones. This is not a book for squeamish readers. I work on subjects in which stories of human martyrdom and torture are commonplace; nevertheless, [End Page 1] even by these grueling standards, it seems possible that Vicious may contain too many nightmarish examples of stomach-turning word and picture images—probably more than absolutely necessary to make Coleman's case that man, not wolf, is the truly vicious animal. The problem here lies in the use of exempla in the medieval sense of the term—as anecdotal fragments to serve a moral program. This is probably a matter of taste. Readers' responses to hunting stories detailing Euro-American cruelty to competing alpha-predators in the course of extermination efforts will vary according to first-hand knowledge of pastoral life. I'd wager few ranchers will feel shocked or dismayed. Still, Coleman details so very many nauseating animal deaths and worse, that this sometimes repetitious inventory of suffering is occasionally too punishing to absorb thoughtfully. One suspects that visceral reaction is part of the author's narrative strategy, working even on specialists concerned with the history of violence. The final chapters on the West at the turn of the twentieth century recount "executions" by federal-government-sponsored hunters of mythic "celebrity wolves" considered by nimrods, chroniclers, and frontier naturalists to be sufficiently long-lived, destructive, and elusive enough to warrant invention of nostalgic escape legends and folksy names (p. 195). Thus, Vicious finally becomes lupine martyrology. What is more concerning is Coleman's decision to privilege the American "consensus" on cruelty toward wolves (in this instance the consensus is limited to the Puritan and Mormon migrations alone), as if such utterly common behavior were uniquely heinous. While acknowledging these practices in passing as the work of "strange people with peculiar habits," who "burned witches at the stake, disemboweled criminals, and tormented wolves for sport," Coleman does far too little to contextualize...

Fortress of the Soul

Johns Hopkins University Press eBooks · 2005-01-01 · 8 citations

Review: <i>Virginia's Children</i>, by Cara Sutherland

The Public Historian · 1992-01-01

Book Review| July 01 1992 Review: Virginia's Children, by Cara Sutherland Virginia's ChildrenCara Sutherland Neil Duff Kamil Neil Duff Kamil Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (1992) 14 (3): 159–162. https://doi.org/10.2307/3378254 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Neil Duff Kamil; Review: Virginia's Children, by Cara Sutherland. The Public Historian 1 July 1992; 14 (3): 159–162. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3378254 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1992 Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.