guarantee of respect for their free status. Hannah did not relish that prospect. Although moving would mean leaving her parents and grandparents, it might also mean the chance to live in a community with fewer legal obstacles. And Anthony had heard that there were other families like them, who looked like them, with whom they might worship without being confined to an area far from the pulpit.2
In many ways, the Nipmucs who lived at Magunkaquog and built the meetinghouse for the settlement and Hannah and Anthony McKenney lived very different lives, but in certain key ways the challenges they confronted were part of the same context. The Nipmucs were in the territory that their people had held since time out of mind, while the McKenneys were only two or three generations removed from Europe and Africa. The McKenneys grew up fully enmeshed in an intimate system of racialized slavery in which only Bermudian Bermudians were free in any significant numbers. But for Natives who had to confront the competing spaces of colonial New England, the line of unfreedom was not so stark. Algonquian tribes were very much present and active, but individual Natives could not always remain free of debt indentures because of increasing colonial encroachment and attacks on their lands, goods (including livestock), and persons.
These variations were part of many larger contexts that scholars have so fruitfully researched and continue to investigate: the long-standing innovation and incorporation of outsiders (of whom Europeans were only the most recent) by the multitude of indigenous peoples of the Americas; the consolidation of power within many tribes in northeastern portions of North America; the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and forced African immigration to the Americas driven by European demand for labor; the increasing immigration of Europeans who by their very presence invaded Native land. More recently, another context to which scholars have turned their attention is the interaction of race and religion in ideas about and practices of human difference in various parts of the early modern Atlantic world. In taking the religions of all seventeenth-century inhabitants seriously, this scholarship has added to our understanding of how Native, African, and European peoples comprehended and accessed their worlds of the unseen.3
Figure I.2. The puritan Atlantic in the long seventeenth century.
They have focused not on the parched and parsed distinctions of authoritative dogma but the practices and performances of lived religion, of physical movements and textual presence. Those repeated practices connected the one to the many, sustaining multiple topographies that outlined overlapping cultural places in a single space.4 The emphasis on practice has revealed the centrality of the body and bodies in colonial interactions. Embodied experience provided a common origin point for human interpretation of the world, with specific explanations varying over time and among cultures. The four planes of the human body (front, back, and two sides) and the movement of the sun meant that many peoples have divided the world into four directions, although they varied in which one they designated as the principal direction. Although all humans comprehend the world through their physical bodies to create a common point of reference, the entire context for giving meaning to that reference, to those physical sensations, the naming of what an individual perceived and felt, was culturally dependent as well as being infinitely variable to each individual in a particular moment.5
This book is thus part of a growing scholarly conversation about the intersections of race, gender, religion, and the body in the Atlantic world. It also takes up the question of appropriate forms of narrative in interpreting the past, and of the fictions and violence that the archive visits on the lives of those millions whose names have been allowed to evaporate along with the breath that once spoke them. More concerned with an underlying ethos and the fluidity of religious practice than with specific and self-articulated connections between dissenting Protestants, this book’s framework of strongly puritan-influenced colonies takes a path that cuts across the topical boundaries that have often cordoned off subfields of the history of the early modern Atlantic: history of slavery and the slave trade, puritan studies, history and archaeology of northeastern Natives and of indigenous Caribbean peoples, and history of sexuality and the body.6
By peeling back the layers of conflicting definitions of bodies and competing practices of faith in the puritan Atlantic over a key period in the ideological attachment of inherited characteristics to particular skin tones, Faithful Bodies identifies local variations of that larger arc leading to the conflation of Christian and white and the concomitant overlap of Negro or Indian and heathen. Colonists’ perceptions of and interactions with indigenous peoples of the Americas and with West Central Africans shaped their definitions of ordered and disordered bodies to create local variations on transatlantic conversations about how to understand human difference and define its acceptable boundaries.7 While Virginian colonists developed a notion of Indians and Africans as no longer “potential Christians” who might eventually blend with English colonial society but rather as innately incompatible “hereditary heathens,” the debate unfolded rather differently in Bermuda and New England.8
English puritans in New England lagged behind Anglo-Virginians in conflating religion with skin color and defining Indians and Africans as categorically ineligible for membership in the body of Christ, while those in Bermuda created strong associations between freedom status and skin color but did not generally turn to Christianity as a differentiating factor. Although relative newcomers sometimes complained that slave owners in Bermuda did not make enough of an effort to convert the people they enslaved, generations of white Bermudians who had grown up alongside generations of Bermudians of color may simply have not seen the need to evangelize a group they considered to be within the Christian community. Many Bermudians of color claimed Christianity as their own even as they practiced and passed on some aspects of their generationally more distant ancestors’ religions. In New England, concentrated communities of Native Christians visibly contested the English circumscribing of “body of Christ” to fit along the lineaments of an English body. Most colonists after King Philip’s War (1675–76) did make the additional step of denying that those gathered communities were truly Christian, but some of the disdainful terminology in Virginia’s records—pagan, infidel, discussions of defilement from English bodily contact with Indians or Africans—was less present in New England’s records.
Bodies
A focus on embodiment and bodies enables a cross-confessional and cross-cultural exploration of seventeenth-century worldviews. The body of Christ is a central metaphor and entity that organizes Christian belief and practice. For Christians generally, Jesus Christ, the son of God, was and is simultaneously fully divine and fully human. Christ’s body as a historical human body was significant because it meant that he was fully human and truly suffered pain and death for the sins of all humanity. The body of Christ has also referred to the church, so that Christians are members of one body, the church. This metaphor of the body has carried multiple meanings at different historical moments because of its importance in Christian cosmology. Not only have people interpreted the body of Christ in various ways at different times and places, but they have had conflicting interpretations in the same time and place. The process of discerning these meanings is complex and does not end in neatly packaged answers, as the meanings themselves are often ambiguous. However, following these crisscrossing branches—much like following the path of neurons in the brain—can lead to unexpected synapses, moments of connection between seemingly disparate elements. A more apt analogy for the seventeenth century is one concerning veins and the circulation of blood; following all the interpretations of the body of Christ moves us through all aspects of religious culture in the English Atlantic, a motion that itself is vital to the functioning of the whole body.
Interpretations of the body of Christ among religious thinkers in seventeenth-century Europe and the puritan Atlantic reveal how people thought about community in a way that intrinsically involved religion as well as cultural readings of the body. As explained by Lewis Bayly, author of the widely used and reprinted spiritual manual The Practice of Pietie, “[A]ll the Faithful, though they be many
