Katharine Gerbner
Biographic Data
| ID | 154602 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Katharine Gerbner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Katharine |
| FAMILY NAME | Gerbner |
| SIGNATURE | GERBNER K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9911-6078 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Archival Irruptions
Archival Irruptions
In 1760, following the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Empire, the Afro-Caribbean word Obeah first appeared in British colonial law. In Archival Irruptions, Katharine Gerbner traces how British authorities in Jamaica came to criminalize Obeah, a practice that was variously seen as a healing method, an Africana religion, a science, and a form of witchcraft. Gerbner shows that in the years directly preceding its criminalizati…
Religio-Nations in the Archives
Ben Wright. Bonds of Salvation
Journal Article Ben Wright. Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. Get access Ben Wright. Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. x, 353. Cloth $45.00. Katharine Gerbner Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota Twin Cities, US Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic …
Heathen
Journal Article Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, by Kathryn Gin Lum Get access Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. By Kathryn Gin Lum. Harvard University Press, 2022. 368 pages. $35.00 (hardcover). Katharine Gerbner Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lfad047, https://doi.org/10.10…
Archival Violence, Archival Capital
In 2011, the Beinecke Library at Yale University purchased the Thomas Thistlewood Papers through a private sale. The collection, which includes nearly ten thousand pages written by Thistlewood, an English overseer and enslaver who lived in Jamaica from 1750 to 1786, has become one of the most important archival sources for understanding slaveholding culture and enslaved life in the British Atlantic world. Yet sources such as the Thistlewood diari…
Passing the Baton at the Journal of Early Modern History
Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean
American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 186–188 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.18 Book Review Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA The word “religion” appears only seven times in Pablo Gómez’s extraordinary book, The…
Babel of the Atlantic
Despite shifting trends in the study of Oceanic Atlantic history, the colonial Atlantic world as it is described by historians today continues to be a largely English-only space; even when other language communities are examined, they, too, are considered to be monolingual and discrete. Babel of the Atlantic pushes back against this monolingual fallacy by documenting multilingualism, translation, and fluid movement across linguistic borders. Focu…
A Dark Inheritance
Reviewed by: A Dark Inheritance: Blood, race, and sex in colonial Jamaica by Brooke N. Newman Katharine Gerbner A Dark Inheritance: Blood, race, and sex in colonial Jamaica By Brooke N. Newman. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018. Brooke N. Newman begins her insightful study about race in colonial Jamaica with a memorial written by three mixed-race men in 1825. The memorial lays out a complex, constitutional argument for extending Eng…
Protestant Supremacy
Protestant Supremacy," the phrase that evoked the majority of commentary in this forum, is a neologism. I began researching Christian Slavery in 2005, but I did not coin "Protestant Supremacy" until 2013. I have an audio recording of the first time I used the phrase. It was during my dissertation defense and I was explaining why I felt it was wrong to use the terms "pro" or "antislavery" to describe the slavery debates of the seventeenth century.…
Christian Slavery
Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy," which excluded the majorit…
Introduction
Missionaries were often the most prolific writers on non-European peoples and cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. As a result, their sources have proven to be indispensable for early modernists. For decades, historians have explored missionary encounters and the sources they inspired to gain insight into a wide variety of topics including native history, the history of religion, labor history, environmental history, the history of the Af…
North America's Maroons
Faithful Bodies. Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, written by Heather Miyano Kopelson
Theorizing Conversion
While Christian evangelization and conversion were often the primary justifications for imperial expansion in the early modern Atlantic world, the meaning of the word “conversion” remains contested among scholars, particularly when used to refer to non‐European conversion to Christianity. Several historians have argued that the term “conversion” simplifies a complex process and reiterates a missionary mindset. This article surveys a variety of al…
They call me Obea”
“They call me Obea” examines the role of obeah within the Moravian mission to Jamaica between 1754 and 1760. While much scholarship has focused on the significance of obeah in Tacky's Revolt of 1760 and later, there has been less attention paid to obeah before it became linked to rebellion and criminalized in British West Indian law. The Moravian missionary sources, a voluminous yet largely unexamined archive of letters, diaries, and account book…
Beyond the “Halfway Covenant”
Jonathan Mitchel, minister of the Cambridge Church (1656–67), used the extension and liberalization of baptism in the 1650s and 60s–later denigrated as the halfway covenant–to bring the unchurched and their children into fellowship, thus indicating a strategy of reaching out to the community, not of appeasing a lapsing or fastidious second generation
The Ultimate Sin
My article traces the changing attitudes toward slave conversion in seventeenth-century Barbados – from hesitant discomfort in the mid-seventeenth century, to virulent rejection in 1680 – and argues that the attempted rebellion of 1675, which was widely blamed on Quaker proselytising efforts, played a pivotal role in the development of an antagonistic attitude toward missionaries in Barbados. The 1675 attempted rebellion, I suggest, linked slave …
Theorizing Conversion
While Christian evangelization and conversion were often the primary justifications for imperial expansion in the early modern Atlantic world, the meaning of the word “conversion” remains contested among scholars, particularly when used to refer to non‐European conversion to Christianity. Several historians have argued that the term “conversion” simplifies a complex process and reiterates a missionary mindset. This article surveys a variety of al…
The Ultimate Sin
My article traces the changing attitudes toward slave conversion in seventeenth-century Barbados – from hesitant discomfort in the mid-seventeenth century, to virulent rejection in 1680 – and argues that the attempted rebellion of 1675, which was widely blamed on Quaker proselytising efforts, played a pivotal role in the development of an antagonistic attitude toward missionaries in Barbados. The 1675 attempted rebellion, I suggest, linked slave …
They call me Obea”
“They call me Obea” examines the role of obeah within the Moravian mission to Jamaica between 1754 and 1760. While much scholarship has focused on the significance of obeah in Tacky's Revolt of 1760 and later, there has been less attention paid to obeah before it became linked to rebellion and criminalized in British West Indian law. The Moravian missionary sources, a voluminous yet largely unexamined archive of letters, diaries, and account book…
Introduction
Missionaries were often the most prolific writers on non-European peoples and cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. As a result, their sources have proven to be indispensable for early modernists. For decades, historians have explored missionary encounters and the sources they inspired to gain insight into a wide variety of topics including native history, the history of religion, labor history, environmental history, the history of the Af…
The Ultimate Sin
My article traces the changing attitudes toward slave conversion in seventeenth-century Barbados – from hesitant discomfort in the mid-seventeenth century, to virulent rejection in 1680 – and argues that the attempted rebellion of 1675, which was widely blamed on Quaker proselytising efforts, played a pivotal role in the development of an antagonistic attitude toward missionaries in Barbados. The 1675 attempted rebellion, I suggest, linked slave …
Beyond the “Halfway Covenant”
Jonathan Mitchel, minister of the Cambridge Church (1656–67), used the extension and liberalization of baptism in the 1650s and 60s–later denigrated as the halfway covenant–to bring the unchurched and their children into fellowship, thus indicating a strategy of reaching out to the community, not of appeasing a lapsing or fastidious second generation
Faithful Bodies. Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, written by Heather Miyano Kopelson
Theorizing Conversion
While Christian evangelization and conversion were often the primary justifications for imperial expansion in the early modern Atlantic world, the meaning of the word “conversion” remains contested among scholars, particularly when used to refer to non‐European conversion to Christianity. Several historians have argued that the term “conversion” simplifies a complex process and reiterates a missionary mindset. This article surveys a variety of al…
They call me Obea”
“They call me Obea” examines the role of obeah within the Moravian mission to Jamaica between 1754 and 1760. While much scholarship has focused on the significance of obeah in Tacky's Revolt of 1760 and later, there has been less attention paid to obeah before it became linked to rebellion and criminalized in British West Indian law. The Moravian missionary sources, a voluminous yet largely unexamined archive of letters, diaries, and account book…
North America's Maroons
Introduction
Missionaries were often the most prolific writers on non-European peoples and cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. As a result, their sources have proven to be indispensable for early modernists. For decades, historians have explored missionary encounters and the sources they inspired to gain insight into a wide variety of topics including native history, the history of religion, labor history, environmental history, the history of the Af…
Christian Slavery
Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy," which excluded the majorit…
Babel of the Atlantic
Despite shifting trends in the study of Oceanic Atlantic history, the colonial Atlantic world as it is described by historians today continues to be a largely English-only space; even when other language communities are examined, they, too, are considered to be monolingual and discrete. Babel of the Atlantic pushes back against this monolingual fallacy by documenting multilingualism, translation, and fluid movement across linguistic borders. Focu…
A Dark Inheritance
Reviewed by: A Dark Inheritance: Blood, race, and sex in colonial Jamaica by Brooke N. Newman Katharine Gerbner A Dark Inheritance: Blood, race, and sex in colonial Jamaica By Brooke N. Newman. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018. Brooke N. Newman begins her insightful study about race in colonial Jamaica with a memorial written by three mixed-race men in 1825. The memorial lays out a complex, constitutional argument for extending Eng…
Protestant Supremacy
Protestant Supremacy," the phrase that evoked the majority of commentary in this forum, is a neologism. I began researching Christian Slavery in 2005, but I did not coin "Protestant Supremacy" until 2013. I have an audio recording of the first time I used the phrase. It was during my dissertation defense and I was explaining why I felt it was wrong to use the terms "pro" or "antislavery" to describe the slavery debates of the seventeenth century.…
Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean
American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 186–188 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.18 Book Review Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA The word “religion” appears only seven times in Pablo Gómez’s extraordinary book, The…
Passing the Baton at the Journal of Early Modern History
Archival Violence, Archival Capital
In 2011, the Beinecke Library at Yale University purchased the Thomas Thistlewood Papers through a private sale. The collection, which includes nearly ten thousand pages written by Thistlewood, an English overseer and enslaver who lived in Jamaica from 1750 to 1786, has become one of the most important archival sources for understanding slaveholding culture and enslaved life in the British Atlantic world. Yet sources such as the Thistlewood diari…
Ben Wright. Bonds of Salvation
Journal Article Ben Wright. Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. Get access Ben Wright. Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. x, 353. Cloth $45.00. Katharine Gerbner Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota Twin Cities, US Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic …
Heathen
Journal Article Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, by Kathryn Gin Lum Get access Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. By Kathryn Gin Lum. Harvard University Press, 2022. 368 pages. $35.00 (hardcover). Katharine Gerbner Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lfad047, https://doi.org/10.10…
Archival Irruptions
Archival Irruptions
In 1760, following the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Empire, the Afro-Caribbean word Obeah first appeared in British colonial law. In Archival Irruptions, Katharine Gerbner traces how British authorities in Jamaica came to criminalize Obeah, a practice that was variously seen as a healing method, an Africana religion, a science, and a form of witchcraft. Gerbner shows that in the years directly preceding its criminalizati…
Religio-Nations in the Archives
History (14 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · History (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (5 works) · Genealogy (5 works)