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11 - The Sacred World of Mary Prince

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2020

Ulinka Rublack
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

This contribution examines the transatlantic reverberations of the Protestant Reformation in Christian missions among enslaved Africans in the West Indies. These spiritual encounters are revealed in the life story of Mary Prince, who escaped to freedom in England in 1826 and wrote a memoir, The History of Mary Prince, (1831), which helped to galvanize the British antislavery movement. The first ex-slave memoir by a woman, it is also a religious narrative structuring Prince’s life as the intertwining of physical liberation and emancipation from sin through membership in the Moravian Church in Antigua. This project uses Moravian manuscripts to reveal the complex spiritual world that Prince’s narrative concealed for strategic reasons. Just a few years after Britain’s closing of the slave trade, Antigua was the site of intense struggle over Christianity. African-derived folk practices flourished alongside and within evangelical worship. Disciplinary ledgers reflect congregants’ consultation of African spiritual adepts, flouting of church regulations, and mockery of Christianity. Prince was engulfed in a multi-layered religious culture at odds with her providential narrative of redemption.

Type
Chapter
Information
Protestant Empires
Globalizing the Reformations
, pp. 296 - 320
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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