In this book, John Nelson reconstructs everyday Anglican religious
practice and experience in Virginia from the end of the seventeenth
century to the start of the American Revolution. Challenging
previous characterizations of the colonial Anglican establishment
as weak, he reveals the fundamental role the church played in the
political, social, and economic as well as the spiritual lives of
its parishioners.
Drawing on extensive research in parish and county records and
other primary sources, Nelson describes Anglican Virginia's parish
system, its parsons, its rituals of worship and rites of passage,
and its parishioners' varied relationships to the church. All
colonial Virginians--men and women, rich and poor, young and old,
planters and merchants, servants and slaves, dissenters and
freethinkers--belonged to a parish. As such, they were subject to
its levies, its authority over marriage, and other social and
economic dictates. In addition to its religious functions, the
parish provided essential care for the poor, collaborated with the
courts to handle civil disputes, and exerted its influence over
many other aspects of community life.
A Blessed Company demonstrates that, by creatively adapting
Anglican parish organization and the language, forms, and modes of
Anglican spirituality to the Chesapeake's distinctive environmental
and human conditions, colonial Virginians sustained a remarkably
effective and faithful Anglican church in the Old Dominion.