American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
Led by Peter Stallybrass and Michael Warner
The 2005 summer seminar focused on the eighteenth-century Anglophone colonies to track the interplay between religious cultures and the circulation of print. Part of the aim of the course was be to defamiliarize the concept of "religion" and to correct the presentist assumption that religion plays a marginal or secondary role in the genesis and structure of the public sphere. The seminar paid particular attention to how publicly circulated materials helped to inculcate habits of piety, and how rhetorics of piety elaborated public cultures among strangers, bringing into dialogue scholars from a variety of fields, including history of the book, public sphere theory, religious history, music history, art history, anthropology, literary studies, and cultural history. Librarians and curators of rare book collections were also encouraged to apply.
Drawing on the treasures of the AAS collection, the seminar concentrated on practical case studies to open up major theoretical questions for each of the following topics:
- the Bible in colonial culture
- new histories of reading
- evangelism, the so-called "Great Awakening," uses of print, and the rise of an evangelical public
- transformations of the New-England Primer in its long career
- the circulation of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress as a Protestant classic and icon
- Benjamin Franklin, in his complex relation to religion and religious markets
Discussion of these topics joined general readings in the secondary literature with hands-on examination of materials in a number of planned workshops. For example, in discussing the cultures of the Bible and scripture reading, we focused on specific psalms and passages from Genesis and Revelation, tracking their production, reproduction and circulation in textual and visual forms.
Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, Director of the History of Material Texts, and Co-Director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent books are O Casaco de Marx (Marx’s Coat), published in Brazil in 1999, and Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, written with Ann Rosalind Jones, winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize in 2001. During the 2004-5 academic year, he holds a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on the material culture of reading, writing and note-taking in early modern England and colonial America and to prepare an exhibition with James N. Green on “Benjamin Franklin and the Book” for 2006, the 275th anniversary of the Library Company and the tercentenary of Franklin’s birth.