Book contents
- Protestant Empires
- Protestant Empires
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Reworking Reformation in the Early English Atlantic
- 2 Puritanism in a Local Context: Ministry, People, and Church in 1630s Massachusetts
- 3 Learned Reading in the Atlantic Colonies: How Humanist Practices Crossed the Atlantic
- 4 Portable Lives: Reformed Artisans and Refined Materials in the Refugee Atlantic
- 5 Idolatry, Markets, and Confession: The Global Project of the de Bry Family
- 6 “Better the Turk than the Pope”: Calvinist Engagement with Islam in Southeast Asia
- 7 Inventing a Lutheran Ritual: Baptisms of Muslims and Africans in Early Modern Germany
- 8 Conversion and Its Discontents on the Southern Colonial Frontier: The Pietist Encounter with Non-Christians in Colonial Georgia
- 9 Globalizing the Protestant Reformation through Millenarian Practices
- 10 Global Protestant Missions and the Role of Emotions
- 11 The Sacred World of Mary Prince
- 12 New Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality in Global Protestantism, 1500–1800
- Index
11 - The Sacred World of Mary Prince
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2020
- Protestant Empires
- Protestant Empires
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Reworking Reformation in the Early English Atlantic
- 2 Puritanism in a Local Context: Ministry, People, and Church in 1630s Massachusetts
- 3 Learned Reading in the Atlantic Colonies: How Humanist Practices Crossed the Atlantic
- 4 Portable Lives: Reformed Artisans and Refined Materials in the Refugee Atlantic
- 5 Idolatry, Markets, and Confession: The Global Project of the de Bry Family
- 6 “Better the Turk than the Pope”: Calvinist Engagement with Islam in Southeast Asia
- 7 Inventing a Lutheran Ritual: Baptisms of Muslims and Africans in Early Modern Germany
- 8 Conversion and Its Discontents on the Southern Colonial Frontier: The Pietist Encounter with Non-Christians in Colonial Georgia
- 9 Globalizing the Protestant Reformation through Millenarian Practices
- 10 Global Protestant Missions and the Role of Emotions
- 11 The Sacred World of Mary Prince
- 12 New Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality in Global Protestantism, 1500–1800
- Index
Summary
This contribution examines the transatlantic reverberations of the Protestant Reformation in Christian missions among enslaved Africans in the West Indies. These spiritual encounters are revealed in the life story of Mary Prince, who escaped to freedom in England in 1826 and wrote a memoir, The History of Mary Prince, (1831), which helped to galvanize the British antislavery movement. The first ex-slave memoir by a woman, it is also a religious narrative structuring Prince’s life as the intertwining of physical liberation and emancipation from sin through membership in the Moravian Church in Antigua. This project uses Moravian manuscripts to reveal the complex spiritual world that Prince’s narrative concealed for strategic reasons. Just a few years after Britain’s closing of the slave trade, Antigua was the site of intense struggle over Christianity. African-derived folk practices flourished alongside and within evangelical worship. Disciplinary ledgers reflect congregants’ consultation of African spiritual adepts, flouting of church regulations, and mockery of Christianity. Prince was engulfed in a multi-layered religious culture at odds with her providential narrative of redemption.
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- Protestant EmpiresGlobalizing the Reformations, pp. 296 - 320Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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