The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism & Architecture in Colonial South Carolina by Louis P. Nelson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS . 1/..u;licam:mt K·. 1/'t..!ltteclu/'C in {/olrmia/, fr){{llt (/a/'olt/w Louis P. Nelson. The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism &Architecture in Colonial South Carolina. Chapel Hill: The University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2008, 516 pp., 255 black-and-white illustrations, 6 tables, cloth, $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3233-2. In this utterly comprehensive and engaging study of eighteenth-century Anglicanism in South Carolina, Louis P. Nelson turns his careful attention to a potentially bewildering range of religious objects and buildings. These include not only church buildings and their liturgical furnishings but also communion silver, gravestones, clocks, bells, pews, bibles, prayer books, inscriptions, sermon contents, musical forms, baptismal gowns, mourning rings, and even aural- and olfactory-sense associations. Along the way, Nelson upsets long-dominant presumptions concerning how to interpret traditional objects, such as buildings and theological texts. He qualifies many shorthand notions about the period, like "Georgian" architecture and "Enlightenment" religion. And, he demonstrates the relevance of the vernacular and everyday manifestations of religion ARRIS 86 § VoLUME 21 ~ 2010 as it was lived over the course of the century. It is a remarkable effort that tells the full story of how colonial Anglicans gave material form to their religious belief and practice. Utilizing relevant methods of cultural and social history, Nelson's study is rooted in impeccable primary-source documentation and field work, allowing him to negotiate between close observation of objects and more general discussion. The resulting argument is a wonderfully compelling portrait of a century in a specific locale among a particular people. That alone is a significant achievement. Yet the book also prods architectural historians to reconsider other times and places where recent attention to vernacular culture and the incorporation of interdisciplinary methods could likewise remake our current understanding. The structure of the book is central to the effectiveness ofNelson's text. Its bulk is divided into three parts, each comprising three chapters that together cover the century up to the Revolutionary War. The parts reflect varying levels of specificity and provide detailed analyses of concrete objects amid broader modes of interpretation. Thus, many churches are revisited across the three parts, but each time they are seen anew. The emerging picture is richer by degrees and always easy to follow, in part due to the wealth of pertinent and well-presented illustrations. Before a methodologically oriented conclusion, Nelson inserts a single-chapter part four that extends the narrative into the early nineteenth century. Part four outlines the radically changed denominational, social, and political landscape and sets up the period's subsequent history in a way that calls for a reinterpretation of the rise of Gothic Revival architecture among Episcopalians. Part one, "Constructing Material Religion," addresses the traditional starting point for such a discussion: church architecture and its formal and stylistic development over the century. Framed around the shift from the experimental, heterogeneous churches of the early eighteenth century to the more consistent, refined vocabulary following mid-century, Nelson demonstrates how Anglican churches were often at the forefront of English ideas, as in the use of auditory plans. They were also marked by distinct regional and local traditions, an observation facilitated by Nelson's intensive study of the Caribbean context and his attention to the operative building cultures dominated by pattern books and local laity. The second part, "Belief and Ritual in Material Religion," maps the decline of the image-rich, analogical tradition evoking God in and through material form against the rise of an intellectual ideal of beauty reflecting divinity through regularity and order. Importantly, Nelson tells this story not only through close readings of each paradigm's contrasting forms but also by following changes in Anglican liturgical practice across the century, especially the implicit theology in sermons and the shift from domestic to corporate identities in religious observance. Nelson presents a nuanced abstraction of "Enlightenment" ideas and thus articulates a distinctly Anglican ethos in specific and local forms. Political and economic forces come to the fore in part three, "Material Religion and Social Practice". Nelson pursues both by progressively tightening his frame from the Greater Caribbean region to colonial South Carolina to individual parish life. Widespread architectural changes...