This volume is a fine introduction to the many manifestations of religious affection in early American Christian encounters. Each of Feeling Godly's four primary essays highlights a cast of historical actors whose words and actions affirm the tremendous range of emotional responses to religious stimuli – intellectual, physical, and everything in between. All also consider the role of “emotional communities” created by the practices of religious affection.
Mark Valeri describes Jonathan Edwards's definition of religious affections as structured, well-ordered, rational responses consistent with contemporary political and philosophical ideas. Valeri's linguistic approach provides and explores the reading habits and processing of language among learned eighteenth century Protestant men. Scott Manning Stevens focuses on the limits of conveying complex religious feelings across European and Indigenous language barriers, specifically among the Haudenosaunee and English and French missionaries. Manning Stevens encourages readers to reconsider claims of linguistic fluidity by the seventeenth and eighteenth century European missionaries, and provides a detailed consideration of the Haudenosaunee's own concepts of religious affection seen in the ska.nonh (“Condolence Ceremony”). Melissa Frost grapples with the problem of hallucinogenic botanicals-inspired ecstatic religious experiences among Indigenous peoples and colonizers in the seventeenth century New Spain, which challenged orthodoxy and creating headaches for the Catholic hierarchy and the Office of the Inquisition. John Sensbach's work on antislavery sentiment among Quakers in North Carolina and the Caribbean considers the role of blackness's positive connotations to some Christians, along with hazards of challenging prevailing racial norms in slave societies.
As a historian of religious encounters and lived religion, I feel these essays are at their best when authors adopt a broad approach to define emotional communities, diverse historical players, and changes over time. While all four essays achieve this, Frost's and Sensbach's essays might be the most useful to scholars of religion and social history.
In creating this book, the editors chose a novel approach: following each essay is a brief response by a fellow scholar, who both enriches and challenges the essayists’ interpretations. Feeling Godly provides a reading experience that feels like an extended conference session, complete with the requisite robust exchange of ideas. It works, and might be a model whose time has come for future essay collections.
