Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.

By Edward L. Bond. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000. Pp. [xii], 330. $35.00, ISBN 0-86554-708-4.)

In recent years colonial Virginia has been examined from almost every conceivable angle: slavery, tobacco culture, social structure, Indian relations, gender prescriptions--but religion has received short shrift. "Souls!" said Sir Edward Seymour to the Virginia colonists. "Damn your souls. Make Tobacco" (p. 194). Now Edward Bond's book turns that English official's view inside out, with mixed results.

In an effort to examine all aspects of religion--institutional, political, social, theological, and devotional--in Virginia, Bond's net is cast wide. The catch, however, is not surprising: Virginia's religious life, shaped by the colony's remoteness from the Church of England and its lack of towns (and churches and clergy), gave it an "ecclesiastical localism" (p. 133) featuring powerful parish vestries and a religious polity quite unlike that of the mother country. As the decades passed, variations in devotional practices and public penances, and a toleration of Quakers, Puritans, and even Roman Catholics, made Virginia a theological backwater, undisturbed by the turmoil of seventeenth-century religious disputes elsewhere.

To Virginia's religious and political authorities, behavior mattered more than beliefs. Indians had attacked English settlements, and so efforts to convert them to Christianity were given up. African slaves might be converted, but they must remain slaves: a 1667 law made it clear that baptism did not confer freedom. As early as 1623 the assembly passed laws altering the traditional religious holiday calendar to suit Virginia's circumstances. Legislation limited the number of feast days between Annunciation (March 25) and St. Michael the Archangel (September 29). The reason for this, the author suggests, was to prevent too much merrymaking when the tobacco-growing season was most demanding of labor.

While this book contains a wealth of information about various laws, policies, royal officials, clergymen, sermons, devotional practices, and vestries from the seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, the demographic and social context it provides is thin. Population figures are lacking, along with the number of parishes and their respective rates of growth. This study is well grounded in the early sources, but it could have made more use of recent research on colonial Virginia. Damned Souls does not fully consider how the complex relationships between class, race, and gender might have played out in the colony's religious life.

From the settlement of Jamestown to the career of a young cleric in the 1760s, this book ranges well beyond the seventeenth century, and the focus is not always clear. Labyrinths of anecdotes and quotations make for an interesting journey but seem to lead only to the rather unsurprising conclusion that Virginia's church was different from England's. Bond's groundwork, however, lays out some useful paths for further exploration of Virginia's religious history.

VIRGINIA BERNHARD
University of St. Thomas