Synopses & Reviews
Intermingling architectural, cultural, and religious history, Louis Nelson reads Anglican architecture and decorative arts as documents of eighteenth-century religious practice and belief. In
The Beauty of Holiness, he tells the story of the Church of England in colonial South Carolina, revealing how the colony's Anglicans negotiated the tensions between the persistence of seventeenth-century religious practice and the rising tide of Enlightenment thought and sentimentality.
Nelson begins with a careful examination of the buildings, grave markers, and communion silver fashioned and used by early Anglicans. Turning to the religious functions of local churches, he uses these objects and artifacts to explore Anglican belief and practice in South Carolina. Chapters focus on the role of the senses in religious understanding, the practice of the sacraments, and the place of beauty, regularity, and order in eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The final section of the book considers the ways church architecture and material culture reinforced social and political hierarchies.
Richly illustrated with more than 250 architectural images and photographs of religious objects, The Beauty of Holiness depends on exhaustive fieldwork to track changes in historical architecture. Nelson imaginatively reconstructs the history of the Church of England in colonial South Carolina and its role in public life, from its early years of ambivalent standing within the colony through the second wave of Anglicanism beginning in the early 1750s.
Review
"This masterful study clearly demonstrates how the understanding of religious experience is enriched by moving beyond analysis of belief systems to explore the added dimenisons of material culture and lived religion. Highly recommended."
-Choice "Drawing on extensive field notes, appropriating useful insights from interdisciplinary perspectives, commanding the primary and secondary literatures, and displaying verve in style, Nelson's volume should become a standard point of reference for anyone interested in South Carolina Anglicanism and its material culture."
-South Carolina Historical Magazine
Synopsis
This important and original study of 18th-century Jamaican architecture, from creole houses to sugar refineries, reveals the islandandrsquo;s impact on the formation of both the modern Atlantic world and the British Empire.
Synopsis
Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire.
Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long eighteenth century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the authorandrsquo;s own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture.
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Nelson begins with an overview of the architecture of the West African slave trade then moves to chapters framed around types of buildings and landscapes, including the Jamaican plantation landscape and fortified houses to the architecture of free blacks. He concludes with a consideration of Jamaican architecture in Britain. By connecting the architecture of the Caribbean first to West Africa and then to Britain, Nelson traces the flow of capital and makes explicit the material, economic, and political networks around the Atlantic.and#160;
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About the Author
Louis Nelson is professor of architectural history and associate dean for research in the School of Architecture, University of Virginia.