Early Modern Prayer

Description

The essays in this book aim to answer the following questions: What was the place of prayer in the early modern world? What did it look and sound like? Of what aesthetic and political structures did it partake, and how did prayer affect art, literature and politics? How did the activities, expressions and texts we might group under the term prayer serve to bind disparate peoples together, or, in turn, to create friction and fissures within communities? What roles did prayer play in intercultural contact, including violence, conquest and resistance? How can we use the prayers of those centuries (roughly 1500–1800) imprecisely termed the ‘early modern’ era to understand the peoples, polities and cultures of that time?

Introduction by William Gibson, Laura Stevens and Sabine Volk-Birke.
Denise M. Kohn: ‘Rowlandson’s “Cover Story”: The Revision of Private Devotional Practice into Public Narrative.’
Elena Marasinova: ‘The Prayer of an Empress and the Eighteenth Century Russian Death Penalty Moratorium’
Linda Meditz: ‘The Captive at Prayer: Cross-Cultural Trauma as Revealed in the Diary of Stephen Williams’.
Penny Pritchard: ‘The Eye of a Needle: Commemorating the ‘Godly Merchant’ in the Early Modern Funeral Sermon.’
Laura Stevens: ‘Mary’s Magnificat in Eighteenth Century Britain’Sabine Volk-Birke: ‘“The Order and Methods of Nosegays”: Imagining Readers in François de Sales's Introduction à la vie dévote (1609) and its eighteenth century English adaptations.’

Sujets

• 18th Century
• Modern
• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 07 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786832276
• Langue: English

Extrait

Early Modern Prayer
Special Issue of The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture 2017
Edited by WILLIAM GIBSON
Oxford Brookes University
with
LAURA M. STEVENS
University of Tulsa
SABINE VOLK-BIRKE
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Editors
Professor William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University
Dr John Morgan-Guy, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
Assistant Editor
Dr Thomas W. Smith, University of Leeds
Reviews Editor
Dr Nicky Tsougarakis, Edge Hill University
Editorial Advisory Board
Professor David Bebbington, Stirling University
Professor Stewart J. Brown, University of Edinburgh
Dr James J. Caudle, Yale University
Dr Robert G. Ingram, Ohio University, USA
Professor Geraint Jenkins, Aberystwyth University
Dr David Ceri Jones, Aberystwyth University
Professor J. Gwynfor Jones, Cardiff University
Dr Frances Knight, University of Nottingham
Professor Kenneth E. Roxburgh, Samford University, USA
Dr Robert Pope, University of Wales: Trinity Saint David
Professor Huw Pryce, Bangor University
Dr Eryn M. White, Aberystwyth University
Rt Revd and Rt Hon. Lord Williams of Oystermouth,
Magdalene College, Cambridge
Professor Jonathan Wooding, University of Sydney
Editorial Contacts
Professor William Gibson [e-mail]
Dr John Morgan-Guy [e-mail]
Dr Thomas W. Smith [e-mail]
Dr Nicky Tsougarakis [e-mail]
Publishers and book reviewers with enquiries regarding reviews should contact the journal’s reviews editor, Dr Nicky Tsougarakis [e-mail]
Cover illustration: Claude Mellan (attr.), frontispiece to the folio edition of François de Sales, Introduction à la Vie Dévote (1641) © The British Library Board.
ISBN 978-1-78683-225-2 eISBN 978-1-78683-227-6 ISSN (Print) 2057-4517 ISSN (Online) 2057-4525 The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture © University of Wales, 2017 Articles and reviews © The Contributors, 2017
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Cover illustration: Claude Mellan (attr.), frontispiece to the folio edition of François de Sales, Introduction à la Vie Dévote (1641) © The British Library Board.uwp
CONTENTS
Contributors
Introduction: Early Modern Prayer
William Gibson, Laura M. Stevens and Sabine Volk-Birke
Rowlandson’s ‘Cover Story’: The Revision of Private Devotional Practice into Public Narrative
Denise M. Kohn
The Prayer of an Empress and the Death Penalty Moratorium in Eighteenth-Century Russia
Elena Marasinova
The Captive at Prayer: Cross-Cultural Trauma as Revealed in the Diary of Stephen Williams
Linda Meditz
The Eye of a Needle: Commemorating the ‘Godly Merchant’ in the Early Modern Funeral Sermon
Penny Pritchard
Mary’s Magnificat in Eighteenth-Century Britain and New England
Laura M. Stevens
The Order and Methods of Nosegays: Mental Prayer in François de Sales’s Introduction à la vie dévote (1609) and its Eighteenth-Century English Adaptations
Sabine Volk-Birke
CONTRIBUTORS
William Gibson is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford Brookes University, UK.
Denise M. Kohn is Professor of English at Baldwin Wallace University, Ohio, USA.
Elena Marasinova is Chief of Research, Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences and was a visiting professor at Columbia University, USA in 2015.
Linda Meditz received her PhD in History from the University of Connecticut in 2016.
Penny Pritchard is Senior Lecturer in English at Hertfordshire University, UK.
Laura M. Stevens is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA.
Sabine Volk-Birke is Professor of English Studies at the Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.
INTRODUCTION: EARLY MODERN PRAYER
William Gibson, Laura M. Stevens and Sabine Volk-Birke
What was the place of prayer in the early modern world? What did it look and sound like? Of what aesthetic and political structures did it partake, and how did prayer affect art, literature and politics? How did the activities, expressions and texts we might group under the term prayer serve to bind disparate peoples together, or in turn to create friction and fissures within communities? What roles did prayer play in intercultural contact, including violence, conquest and resistance? How can we use the prayers of those centuries (roughly 1500–1800) imprecisely termed the ‘early modern’ era to understand the peoples, polities and cultures of that time?
Even if questions such as these are asked with a view to Christianity only, excluding other world religions, they impinge on the dynamics of transatlantic and intercultural relations, especially when Europeans engaged in intercontinental exploration, colonialism and conquest. Christopher Columbus initially denied that the populations he encountered in what he thought were the Indies participated in anything like prayer, having ‘no religion of their own’, thus supporting his assertion that these peoples ‘could very easily become Christians’. 1 Amerigo Vespucci was similarly dismissive, noting in a letter describing his third voyage, ‘here we were received with so many barbarous ceremonies that the pen will not suffice to write them down’. 2 Whether the peoples he encountered were engaged in rituals of hospitality or divine worship is unclear, but that Vespucci bypassed any consideration of the meaning of ceremonies says much about the dynamics of early intercontinental encounter. To recognize a foreign people’s words or actions as prayer, if we consider prayer broadly to be attempted communication with what is transcendent, spiritual or divine, might be understood as an acknowledgement of some cultural substance and depth beyond what is dismissed out of hand as barbaric or primitive. A people without prayer is a people more easily, and with more ethical justification, transformed to suit one’s own desires.
The determination of what counted as prayer and religious worship was at the centre of what has come to be known as the Chinese Rites Controversy, a dispute among Roman Catholic missionaries with very high stakes for the ascendancy of various religious orders within the Church but even more so for relations between the papacy and the Chinese emperor. Were Chinese rituals of honouring deceased ancestors, along with other imperial and Confucian ceremonies, essentially religious or civil? The answer to this question, hotly debated by Jesuit, Franciscan and Dominican missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, determined whether the Roman Catholic Church would demand that Chinese converts abandon these rituals, and indeed whether the Kangxi emperor would allow missionaries to continue to work in China. 3
Recognizing prayer, and naming it as such, might be necessary to respectful intercultural communication, but it was far from sufficient. Hernan Cortés’s awareness of an Aztec religion with a sophisticated set of rituals and prayers certainly did not prevent him from undertaking the conquest of the Aztec empire. Rather, it helped provide the visual language of conquest. Of Cortés’s march on the capital city of Tenochtitlán, John Elliott noted, ‘As they moved inland, they threw down “idols” and set up crosses in Indian places of worship.’ 4 The colonization of New Spain, New England and New France is well known to have unfolded in part through the instruction of indigenous peoples in Christianity, but it was the adoption of these imported forms of prayer that often evidenced to Europeans the success of their missionary efforts. The more than a thousand Wampanoag, Narragansett, Massachusett, Nipmuc and other indigenous peoples who adopted the rigorous Reformed Christianity brought over by New England’s Puritan colonists were known as ‘Praying Indians’. This term figured prominently in promotional documents for the New England colonies, especially their missionary efforts, and it also played an important role in these converts’ understanding and presentation of themselves. 5
Colonial encounters had a transformative effect on both indigenous and imported modes of prayer. Much has been written about syncretism as a response to missionary activity, but there is a great deal more to be gained from studying prayer as a specific setting of word and action, both extempore and liturgical, in which cultures intersect with and alter each other. For example, Stephanie Schmidt’s recent analysis of the Cantares mexicanos , an alphabetic Nahuatl-language manuscript from sixteenth-century Central Mexico, has found, amidst pre-Columbian songs, a song-dance connected with the gladiatorial rites of the Flaying of Men, in which war captives were ritually sacrificed, but in which Christian words and figures are present. ‘[N]am[ing] three sacred or exemplary figures – two Christian, one Mesoamerican – and locating each in a fundamental domain of the Nahua cosmos’, this song-dance ‘selectively accommodates elements of Christia