Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World

Description

An interdisciplinary exploration of the influence of physical space in the study of religion

While the concept of an Atlantic world has been central to the work of historians for decades, the full implications of that spatial setting for the lives of religious people have received far less attention. In Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World, John Corrigan brings together research from geographers, anthropologists, literature scholars, historians, and religious studies specialists to explore some of the possibilities for and benefits of taking physical space more seriously in the study of religion.

Focusing on four domains that most readily reflect the importance of Atlantic world spaces for the shape and practice of religion (texts, design, distance, and civics), these essays explore subjects as varied as the siting of churches on the Peruvian Camino Real, the evolution of Hispanic cathedrals, Methodist identity in nineteenth-century Canada, and Lutherans in early eighteenth-century America. Such essays illustrate both how the organization of space was driven by religious interests and how religion adapted to spatial ordering and reordering initiated by other cultural authorities.

The case studies include the erasure of Native American sacred spaces by missionaries serving as cartographers, which contributed to a view of North America as a vast expanse of unmarked territory ripe for settlement. Spanish explorers and missionaries reorganized indigenous-built space to impress materially on people the "surveillance power" of Crown and Church. The new environment and culture often transformed old institutions, as in the reconception of the European cloister into a distinctly American space that offered autonomy and solidarity for religious women and served as a point of reference for social stability as convents assumed larger public roles in the outside community. Ultimately even the ocean was reconceptualized as space itself rather than as a connector defined by the land masses that it touched, requiring certain kinds of religious orientations—to both space and time—that differed markedly from those on land.

Collectively the contributors examine the locations and movement of people, ideas, texts, institutions, rituals, power, and status in and through space. They argue that just as the mental organization of our activity in the world and our recall of events have much to do with our experience of space, we should take seriously the degree to which that experience more broadly influences how we make sense of our lives.

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Atlantico
• Travels (book)
• Atlantic history
• Journal of World History
• Atlantic Community
• Atlantic World
• Crusades
• American Tract Society
• Christian Order
• Confessionalization
• Atlanticism
• Cosmography
• State
• Counter-Reformation
• British North America
• Converso
• South
• European colonization of the Americas
• History of the Americas
• History of religions
• Crusade
• United States
• Sun Myung Moon
• FL
• Local
• KY
• LA
• TN
• John Dury
• Nouveau chrétien
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• VA
• GA

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611177978
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

R ELIGION , S PACE, AND THE A TLANTIC W ORLD
The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World
Sponsored by the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World of the College of Charleston
RELIGION, SPACE,
AND THE
ATLANTIC WORLD
EDITED BY
John Corrigan

The University of South Carolina Press
© 2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-796-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-61117-797-8 (ebook)
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: MAPS
A Sea of Texts: The Atlantic World, Spatial Mapping, and Equiano’s Narrative
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Clerics, Cartographers, and Kings: Mapping Power in the French Atlantic World, 1608–1752
George Edward Milne
Mapping Urban Religion in an Atlantic Port
Kyle B. Roberts
PART TWO: DISTANCE
Missionary Time and Space: The Atlantic World in the Early Modern Age
Luca Codignola
Religious Community and Cross-Religious Communication beyond the Atlantic World: The Lost Tribes in the Americas and Mecca
Brandon Marriott
The Religious Spaces of American Whaling
Richard J. Callahan, Jr .
PART THREE: DESIGN
Spatial Hegemony and Evangelization: A Network-Based View of an Early Franciscan Doctrinal Settlement in Highland Peru
Steven A. Wernke and Lauren E. Kohut
Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make: French America’s Cosmopolitan Cloisters
Jan Noel
Configuring and Reconfiguring Cathedral Space in the Spanish Atlantic: From Cathedral-Mosque to Baroque Machine
Sing D’Arcy
PART FOUR: IDENTITIES
Emigration, Transatlantic Communication, and Methodist Identity in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Québec
Todd Webb
Confessional Spaces and Religious Places: Lutherans in America, 1698–1748
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe
Confessional Spatiality in the Puritan Atlantic
Heather Miyano Kopelson
Notes
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Florida State University, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, and the Virtual Center for Spatial Humanities. Thanks to Molly Reed for assistance organizing gatherings of the Working Group on Religion and Space in the Atlantic World, Shawntel Ensminger for editing assistance, and John Crow for drawing maps. It has been a pleasure to work with Jim Denton and Linda Fogle at the University of South Carolina Press and an honor to have this book included in the press’s Atlantic World list. David Bodenhamer and Trevor Harris, as always, offered invaluable criticisms and suggestions from the beginning. I thank three anonymous readers, whose critically astute, detailed suggestions helped me improve the introduction and guided other contributors in their revisions. I also thank Edward Blum, Bret Carroll, Yvonne Chireau, Edward Gray, Paul Harvey, Sylvester Johnson, Tracy Leavelle, Darrin McMahon, and Amanda Porterfield for their readings of parts of the manuscript and/or their conversation in helping me think through an assortment of issues addressed in this book.
INTRODUCTION

A t a banquet in ancient Thessaly, the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (556–468 . B.C .) chanted a lyric to a roomful of celebrants during a dinner convened to honor their host, Scopas. According to Greek storytellers, when Simonides stepped outside a short time later, the roof of the house collapsed, all were killed, and the bodies were crushed beyond recognition. Called upon to help identify the victims, Simonides subsequently was able to name the dead by recalling the places they had sat at the table. His “method of loci,” later referred to as “the memory palace,” was reported by Cicero: “He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.” 1
The relationship between memory and location discussed by Cicero, Quintilian, and other ancients, and exploited in the academic practice of memorization in medieval Europe, has been investigated recently by researchers who have begun to refer to “spatial learning” as an aspect of human brain activity located largely in the hippocampus. 2 Brain science proposes that the mental organization of our activity in the world and the recall of events has much to do with our experience of space. The spatial organization of knowledge is not just a trick of the Greek poet but a hard-wired process that affects the manner in which persons engage the world and make sense of it. That spatially enabled practice of mnemonics encompasses not only the business of storing thoughts, but as Yadin Dudai and Mary Carruthers recently have suggested in Nature , it also frames creative and future-oriented thinking. 3 Spatial thinking is not a sideline to other kinds of thinking but is closely interwoven with them, playing a crucial role in the human practice of world-making through the mental production, organization, archiving, and alteration of knowledge.
To think spatially as a historian or academic humanist is to take seriously the degree to which persons’ experience of space influences the manner in which they make sense of their lives. Over the course of the past few decades, researchers in various disciplines have made strong contributions to our understanding of how space is constructed in culture. We have learned much about the ways in which cultural boundaries are established, contested, and erased; how power has spatial referents; how our engagement of the spaces of everyday life shapes our lives in unexpected fashion; and how the territories of body, society, and nation can be reimagined. Such research has proven fundamental to the work of many historians. At the same time it has had the effect of distracting us from thinking more seriously about the manner in which our engagement of physical space—in the sense of Euclidean space, within which we as embodied individuals are situated—influences our lives. In the last decade or so, scholarship has begun to reassess the importance of physical space and to estimate how our lives within it are recognizably wrought.
As scholars increasingly have turned their attention to geographic space, a promising avenue of historical investigation is developing at the intersection of (1) research that focuses on the cultural construction of space and (2) studies that stress the direct influence of natural and built physical environments on human lives. From the former we can glean insight into how space is conceived in ways that represent cultural ideals and social predicaments, and from the latter we can learn to appreciate how a coastline, mountain range, piazza, skyscraper, or vast desert set terms for how persons think about their lives and direct their behavior. Spatial thinking joins an awareness of physical environment to culturally derived notions of space as a mirror of social order and power. Such an approach blends attentiveness to what the seating places at Scopas’s table reveal about social status, emotional relationships, and religious and political traditions with judgments about the relation of actors to the physical environment.
Research that is attentive to spatiality, then, recognizes the cultural construction of space while remaining wary of taking such constructions as accurate diagrams of physical environment—a virtue historically modeled by Copernicus. A “spatial humanities” 4 advances interpretation by framing historical actors within a broad range of spatial instances, such as the Silk Road, a soccer stadium, the Atlantic world, Times Square, an operating room, the Taj Mahal, or an island. It is inclined to interpretation that is informed by the discovery of patternings and correlations within and across spatial planes, three-dimensional shapes, or coordinate points, alongside interpretation arising from theory-driven analyses of ideologies of space. It asks hard questions, for example, about how we are to understand interpretive claims of “bilocal” and “polylocal” identities when persons actually experience space through physical bodies that can occupy only one space at a time. 5 Similarly, the spatial humanities can prompt rethinking of historical interpretation of how the development of local economic theory, for example, was conditioned by proximity to mineral and biological resources, waterways and terrain suited to trade, and defensible space. 6 And the spatial humanities can lead to rethinking how the words we use to describe our lives are spatially conditioned. The experience of place and the mental images we locate there build, as Cicero observed, a story of our lives, as we “employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.”
The Space of the Atlantic World
The Atlantic world as a space defined by four continents and the ocean they share has proven a useful prompt for historians whose interests were not well served by previous historiography. Over several decades the notion of