Lexington Books
Pages: 218
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9⅜
978-0-7391-8974-0 • Hardback • July 2014 • $110.00 • (£85.00)
978-0-7391-8975-7 • eBook • July 2014 • $104.50 • (£81.00)
Debra Meyers is professor of history and women's and gender studies and director of public history at Northern Kentucky University.
Melanie Perreault is professor of history and associate provost at Salisbury University.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Section One: Belief Systems
Introduction
Chapter One: Adam Jortner, Without Demons: Witchcraft, Gender, and Law in the Colonial Chesapeake
Chapter Two: Monica Witkowski, “A Witch amongst All Them”: Chesapeake Witchcraft as a Case Study for Colonial North American Witchcraft Beliefs
Chapter Three: Debra Meyers, “The people are not att all fond of the Litturgy or cerimonyes”: Theology in the Early Chesapeake
Section Two: Legal Systems
Introduction
Chapter Four: Jeffrey Sawyer, English Law and the “Rights of Persons” in Early Maryland
Chapter Five: Allison Madar, “An Innate Love of Cruelty”: Master Violence Against Female Servants in Eighteenth-Century Virginia
Chapter Six: Karen Lubieniecki, Apart Before Death: Separated Women in Colonial Maryland
Chapter Seven: Kristalyn Shefveland, Sic jurat transcendere montes ("Thus he swears to cross the mountains"): Alexander Spotswood, Colonial and Native diplomacy in the 1722 Albany Peace
Section Three: Labor Systems
Introduction
Chapter Eight: Teresa Foster, “A shameful and unblessed thing”
Convict Bondwomen in eighteenth-century Maryland
Chapter Nine: Vaughn Scribner, ‘A Genteel and Sensible Servant’: The Commodification of African Slaves in Tidewater Virginia, 1700-1774
Chapter Ten: Jennie Jeppesen, “To serve longer according to law”: The chattel-like status of convict servants in Virginia
These articles provide ample room for reflection on how a tug-of-war between resistance to and assertion of social control led to order and civility in the Chesapeake.
— Journal of American History
This collection from established and emerging scholars offers fresh and sophisticated essays on the beliefs, legal systems, and labor systems of the early Chesapeake. This innovative organization makes the book a fruitful one, not only for scholars, but also for students who can use the essays to compare sources, arguments, and methods.
— Sarah Hand Meacham, Virginia Commonwealth University
This is a fine and provocative collection of essays from a band of largely junior scholars, newly minted Ph.Ds. and the like. All the essays in some way revisit the ‘origins debate,’ and the nature and extent of ‘unfreedom’ in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia and the Chesapeake, with the additional concentration on class and gender. These young scholars have not only produced some new interpretations of old arguments, they shift our attention from the antebellum period and black enslavement, which has dominated much of the scholarship for the last four decades, to the colonial period and unfree, non-black labor, particularly indentured and convict labor. We are reminded of the harsh realities of life for those unable to assert and maintain their legal freedom, such as wives separated from husbands, convict women, or those accused of witchcraft. These essays make abundantly clear that race was far from the primary determining factor in an age when ‘freedom’ was far from universal and exploitation of the powerless was widespread.
— Larry Hudson, University of Rochester