The Mason Monteith

"Students, private school Semsülmekâtib." The photograph is part of a survey taken in the Ottoman Empire between 1880-93. The collection highlights educational, military and government facilities as well as historic sites. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Abdul Hamid II Collection, Number: LC-USZ62-81452.

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In 1773, shortly after his wife Ann died, George Mason IV of Virginia wrote his will. There, he confirmed his son's ownership of "a large silver Bowl given him [George Mason V] by my Mother, in which all my children have been christened, and which I desire remain in the family unaltered for that purpose."¹ That sentence tells us that the bowl was used for baptism, for washing Mason's children clean of sin and conferring Christian identity on each child. It also identifies the bowl as a family treasure, passed down from parent to child through the generations. Finally, in stating his wishes that the bowl remain "unaltered," Mason was signaling his deep connection to the bowl: by the 1770s, when Mason wrote his will, the particular form of this bowl, the notched monteith, had been out of fashion for over a generation, but Mason did not want his son to follow the common practice of melting down outmoded silver objects and reshaping them into more modish forms.² This brief essay will suggest that the bowl's importance derived not just from its monetary value but from its place in a chain of family transmission and its use in the religious ritual that defined children's place in both their family and the church.

The bowl itself—the material of which it is made, its shape, the ornaments that decorate it—is something of a synecdoche for infant baptism as practiced by elite families like the Masons, and, indeed, for the kind of Christian life the Mason children were invited into when they were baptized. The bowl is silver, an exceptionally valuable and symbolic commodity in the eighteenth century. Silver signaled gentility; in the estimation of historian Richard Bushman, it was "perhaps the surest way to assert cultural authority and superiority in colonial society." The Mason bowl spoke to George Mason's guests, and to the Mason family themselves, about the Masons' elegance, about their position in a (local) social hierarchy, and about their participation in a (trans-national) market of luxury goods. But social status is only one meaning we can find in the bowl's silver gleam. Silver also had a strong association with divinity. Silver was used at the altar because of its divine connotations, and in turn its use in the sacrament of baptism further instructed people that silver was the right material to use in rituals where, to quote Bushman again, "divinity was embodied in external forms." Silver's beauty hinted at the beauty of God, and a silver object "trailed clouds of glory as it performed its duties."³

Mason Family Baptismal Bowl. © Courtesy of the Board of Regents of Gunston Hall

Silver's association with divinity is made explicit by the cherubim that decorate the top of Mason's bowl. Perhaps it was those angels that first suggested to the Masons the kind of Christian life into which the Mason children were invited. Cherubim appear elsewhere in both ecclesial architecture and household decorative arts of the period; the baptismal font at Christ Church, Lancaster Country, Virginia, for example, was a grey marble bowl decorated with the heads of four cherubs.⁴ Especially in the context of baptism, cherubs held a double meaning. First, cherubim connoted death. Angels were said to be present at the deathbeds of faithful Christians, ushering the dying heavenward; that association was underscored by cherubim's appearance on English tombstones since at least the early eighteenth century.⁵ When found on a baptismal font or christening bowl, cherubs' associations with mortality signaled the fact that baptism was a kind of death—a going down into a tomb of water. Of course, the "death" of baptism was a...