The fragile alliance has held, and the Modern Language Association (MLA) approved Lomax’s proposal that he unveil Ledbetter at the annual meeting. Joined by Alan Lomax, the trio continue to head north in early December, continuing to collect songs along the way in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. They spend Christmas in Washington, D.C. and then head to the MLA gathering, where Lomax insists that Ledbetter be presented not in the suit and bowtie he prefers, but in the outfit of a prisoner: dungaree overalls, a work shirt, and a straw hat. “Lead Belly” is thus introduced to his largest audience ever, and a storm of sensational and racist publicity follows.

This chapter establishes Andrewes’ theology as intensely Christocentric and locates the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation at its heart. In tracing the progression through the great feasts of the Christian year, from Christmas, through Easter to Whitsun, Andrewes showed how Christ, both God and man, combined with the other persons of the Trinity to effect the salvation of fallen humanity. In this way he grounded the life of faith and the spiritual progress of the Christian through the sacraments and ordinances of the church towards salvation both in the liturgical year and in the great events of salvation history.

This chapter examines how Faulkner uses the trope of parchment skin in his 1932 novel Light in August to describe his racially ambiguous protagonist Joe Christmas who becomes marked as Black through a range of media forms including magazines, Bibles, blackboards, and a Kodak print. While Faulkner can be patronizing in his depictions of writing by African American characters, the use of African drumming in his story “Red Leaves” (1930) to communicate over long distances in an earlier form of writing-at-a-distance that we find in telegraphy exemplifies powerful kinds of communication by Black characters. The chapter shows how Faulkner reworks the issue of race and writing materials in Intruder in the Dust (1948), refiguring the white pencil of the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse in his fictional town of Jefferson into the white pencil of a flashlight beam that portends racial change. The chapter concludes with a discussion of writing by American Indian characters that range from lampoons to meditations on genre where Native literacy undercuts romantic stereotypes.

Abandoning the notion that royalists were the custodians of a stable pre-war church, Chapter 8 explores some of the different trends, tensions and developments evident within royalist religious thinking in this decade. After outlining the official royalist position of support for the reforms of 1640-41, the chapter outlines some of the tensions, ranging from those divines keen to support further reforms to those ex-Laudians deploring the concessions already made. Concerns at the threat posed to episcopacy in peace negotiations led to more emphatic defences of the order as being integral to the royalist cause, and a renewed interest in Convocation. The chapter also traces new emphases in royalist thought that transcended some of the divisions between ex-Laudians and their critics, including moral reform and a providentialism which often echoed parliamentarian language. The royalist experience after defeat in the civil war is examined, tracing forms of resistance to new ministers and to the abolition of feasts such as Christmas, but also noting the ways in which royalists embraced compromise, appealing for toleration on the model of pre-war puritanism and also contemplating forms of limited conformity and liturgical adaptation. It concludes by arguing that royalist religion remained ideologically hybrid and contested.

Chapter 1 examines the tensions that erupted in the 1830s and 1840s in reaction to the Poor Law Commission’s ban on serving festive meals of roast beef and plum pudding to workhouse inmates. It demonstrates that, despite the new drive to centralize relief policies in the 1830s, local authorities frequently overrode and undermined directives that interfered with their right to dispense aid in traditional ways that they felt enhanced social stability. This chapter explores the symbolic meaning of roast beef to the institutionalized poor, the Boards of Guardians that superintended them, and the communities in which they were imbedded. It argues that a study of when and why paupers were and were not furnished with what was often termed “Old English Fare” in the early years of the New Poor Law reveals that the transition from moral economy to political economy was far from complete. The tensions that erupted amongst local and central government officials, paupers, and communities in reaction to the Poor Law Commission’s attempt to ban these meals suggests that debates over food were part of much broader negotiations about both the role of the modern state and the place of the poor within local and national communities.