- The Spice of Popery: Converging Christianities on an Early American Frontier by Laura M. Chmielewski
“Christian eclecticism” (p.7) characterized the sometimes porous borders between transplanted French Catholics and English dissenting Protestants in early-seventeenth-century Maine. By the early-eighteenth century, however, “lived religion” in the forms of material culture Laura Chmielewski identifies as “Protestant Ornaments and Popish Relics” (pp. 211–42) resolidified European confessional hostilities. First Peoples who had fought as allies for the two European confessional groups contributed unintentionally to the process since European captives sometimes adopted the religion of their captors’ European allies. Parents who wished to leave inheritances to children still held captive sometimes did so with stipulations that those heirs would only benefit from bequests if they were still staunch in the parents’ faith or were willing to be reconverted. By the 1690s the “eclecticism” of the early Maine exchanges among Europeans and First Peoples began to vanish with the emergence of patterns familiar elsewhere in the English mainland colonies—that in Protestant areas “the land should be worked and the waters fished by Protestant hands, and that Maine’s native peoples should be brought to a Protestant form of Christianity” (p. 270).
Chmielewski argues, however, that the ferocious confrontations between French and English settlers and their indigenous allies in the decades from [End Page 177] 1688 to 1727 alerted at least Protestant observers in the Massachusetts Bay colony that this province to the northeast badly needed a shot of Puritan orthodoxy to prevent the infection of Catholicism—the “spice of popery” of Chmielski’s title—from spreading (pp. 3–4). A certain ambivalence in interpretation, therefore, makes it sometimes difficult to ascertain exactly what the author wishes to argue. In the end, she seems to be advancing a perspective that is very much in line with what other scholars such as Jane Merritt have posited for other European-First Peoples encounters. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, older alliances and the exchanges in cultures and religious views of the world declined as more familiar European institutions—and especially demographic explosion—erased the patterns of eclectic exchanges that Chmielewski has tried to recover for that earlier story fashioned by Maine’s different cultural groups. Despite sometimes heroic efforts to demonstrate the robustness of her posited eclectic religious world of the mid-seventeenth century, however, the author perhaps tries a bit too hard. She has to admit, for example, that the confessional hostilities of Europe fairly quickly put an end to the porous boundaries, nowhere more so than in the figure of the Virgin Mary “representing both triumphal, militant Catholicism and, for Protestants, the worst and perhaps most dangerous hallmarks of popery.” (228) In truth, not only in this context but also globally, non-Europeans grasped quite quickly—and appear to have made their own—commitments to a confessionally-specific Christianity, even when adapting the faith to some of their own cultural norms. Nonetheless, this book tells a story of a part of the North Atlantic world with which most readers will be only vaguely familiar. Solidly grounded both in research and awareness of the scholarly literature (especially on the northeastern geographic areas of European-indigenous exchanges), Chmielewski reaffirms the centrality of antipopery and its transplantation to Maine. Moreover, whatever a few elite figures may have deprecated the act, her rather grim afterword on the nineteenth-century vandalism of the monument to the Jesuit missionary Sebastian Rale actually suggests that precisely at the level of “lived religion” confessional worldviews had, perhaps, never changed all that much.