Ritual Time in British Plantation Colonies, 1650-1780

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3341014
AutoresNicholas M Beasley (autor de correspondencia)
Año2007
Volumen76
Número3
Páginas541-568
Fecha de publicación2007-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaChurch History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0009-6407 • E-ISSN: 1755-2613
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0009640700500572
OpenAlexW2515358939
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas66

Four thousand miles of ocean divided the plantation colonies of the first British Empire from the English metropole, a great physical distance that was augmented by the cultural divergence that divided those slave societies from England. Colonists in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina thus made the re-creation of English ritual ways central to their ordering of the colonial experience. In particular, the preservation of the English liturgical year and its ritual enactment offered opportunities to connect colonial experience to metropolitan ideal. Confronted with seasons and crops that did not square meteorologically with English experience, colonists sought the comfort of maintaining English calendrical norms as much as possible. Within parish boundaries, colonists built churches in which the parish community could gather for the carefully scheduled, well-ordered worship of the English national church. The English Sabbath was central to the passage of time in weekly units, a day set apart for the church's liturgy, rest from labor, and social gatherings. The great and minor festivals of the Christian year and the daily office offered similar opportunities for Christian teaching and social fellowship, just as the celebration of state holidays connected these distant outposts of the empire to the Protestant national narrative that held an increasingly British people together. These ways of ordering time lent meaning to days that otherwise slipped by amid the routines of agricultural, commercial, and domestic life

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Empire · Estate · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Liturgy · Meaning (existential · Metropolitan area · Narrative · Political science · Protestantism · Sociology · Worship · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Psychology