Sacred Violence in Early America by Susan Juster (review)

This is a book that recommends itself to scholars in all fields of early modern European research, but particularly to those who consider the early modern Transatlantic. While it focuses on the Anglosphere, the themes of the book are relevant to the entire European encounter with the New World. Sacred Violence in Early America is, Susan Juster writes, 'a deep cultural history of the theology of violence: the presuppositions, referential chains, and linguistic homologies that structured how early Americans narrated, rationalized and fantasized about, and occasionally apologized for violence against a variety of religious "others"—heretics, sectarians, and, especially, Indians' (p. 3).

Juster shows, clearly and vividly, that the violence inherent in the European religious contestations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries moved with them to the New World. Once there, far from becoming a new people as was once supposed, they continued the patterns of thought, behaviour, and belief structured and attuned to violence as fundamental to their religious project, and thus to all other habits of life. Juster goes about 'unearthing the logics that sustained such paradigmatic acts as warfare, captivity, conversion, heresy-hunting, and iconoclastic attacks' from 'English justifications for their own actions with an ear attuned to the rich semiotic and devotional traditions' of Western Christianity (p. 3). Through an 'archaeology of discourse' Juster examines the 'distinct theological paradigm' of 'blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction and iconoclasm' (each a chapter) and 'peels away the discursive layers to reveal the medieval and early modern antecedents' that provided 'form and meaning for […] colonial violence' to 'reconstruct the grammar of religious encounter' (p. 4).

Her method is to 'identify and then tug, sometimes vigorously, at the ideological and rhetorical threads that bind early American religious violence […] to Europe's wars of religion' (p. 4). This enables Juster to follow the 'bright red line' of blood sacrifice, or the more episodic appearance of cannibalism, or concern about unruly tongues, through 'the entire corpus of colonial texts' (p. 4) to show that violence was in the very bones of the European encounter with 'America'. Juster's literary methods may not please all readers, particularly those attuned to the traditional political and religious histories of Puritanism. But what Juster offers here is not 'individual findings, many of which have been known to scholars for some time, but the assembling and juxtaposing of these historical fragments to create a discursive map of early Anglo-American encounter with the religious other' (p. 5).

Juster's work particularly reveals how the language of religious violence saturated everyday religious life for early Anglo-Americans. Her contention is that understanding this aspect of their religious mentalities enables comprehension of 'the combustible mixture of sacred and profane fears and desires that led English men and women to behave […] in such a savage manner toward their enemies in the New World' (p. 7). In calling this 'sacred violence' Juster is saying that even quotidian violence (against Quakers, Native Americans, African-Americans, other Anglo-Americans) was 'motivated and justified in significant part by religious aversion and/or desire' (p. 6) intended to 'restore the boundary between the sacred and the profane or to render profane what others find sacred' (p. 7). While not saying religious motivations were the only motivations to violence in early Anglo-America, Juster (with a nod to Natalie Zemon Davis, p. 7) demonstrates that the 'conquest and settlement of the New World was in fact the final bloody chapter of the Reformation Wars' (p. 13).

If there are any concerns about this work, they would relate to what it does not include. This is in no way a criticism of Juster's study, which, in addressing the continuity of paradigms of religious violence from Europe to the New World, is a major contribution to the historiography of the early modern Transatlantic World and provides an important new perspective. But in taking her insights further, scholars must...