How did this project come about?

In some sense The Cambridge History of Religions in America is a by-product of the historical vision Lord Acton articulated, the desire to shed historical light on all aspects of the human experience, in this case the place and function of religions in America. That is a professional goal I shared with many of my colleagues in the field of American religious history. My first major contact with Cambridge University Press involved the editing of The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards (2007). That experience led to the invitation to take on the position as Editor of the Cambridge History. I had previously logged considerable editorial experience, namely, three volumes in the Yale University Press Edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards and several decades as coeditor of the “Religion in North America” publication series at Indiana University Press. My interests in American religions were widespread, from the evangelical world of Edwards to the Lutheran tradition in which I was raised, from the diverse spiritual groups on the margins of American life to the highly controversial so-called “sects and cults.” My three and a half decades as a professor of American religious history at Indiana University, Bloomington, also situated me well for ranging across the full spectrum of diverse American religious life, from pre-colonial times to contemporary America. I published a major historical study of the Shaker religious movement at Yale Press. In 1994 I served as President of American Society of Church History. In the planning stages of the Cambridge project I was assisted by an Editorial Advisory Board comprised of seven distinguished scholars whom I appointed who shared my interests in the full range and variety of America’s religions.

What gap do these volumes address in the field?

The Cambridge History of Religions in America takes seriously the religious integrity of the highly diverse religious and spiritual traditions that have been present and/or are still present in the context of North America, with a focus being principally upon those traditions in the United States. Yet these volumes also recognize and treat the ways in which the religious traditions of North America cross national boundaries and also surrounding oceans. In other words, these volumes deal directly with the ways in which America’s religions are connected to the diversity of religions across the globe, many having been imported from abroad and others now being exported to faraway places. Too often studies of America’s religions have failed to describe the formative and critical relationships with the communities of faith on the other continents. In fact, a majority of America’s religious traditions have been imported in one way or another from abroad, and that dimension of the faith communities on this continent is a striking component of the Cambridge History. It is also the case that new religious traditions originating in the United States have been exported from America to other parts of the world. These volumes describe and evaluate the expanding religious and spiritual pluralism in America over the course of more than five hundred years.

What are some of the challenges you encountered?

Meeting editorial deadlines when 115 authors are involved posed all kinds of challenges. A majority of the authors met the submission deadlines that were set, but a good number  did not, and that was a major challenge. There is also always a certain tension which exists when copyediting another scholar’s writing, and in a few instances that created some uncomfortable moments. The fact that the texts were set and published by staff in India meant that there was no direct contact for questions or reactions, all of which were handled through a third party in New York City. At times that was frustrating to authors with whom I dealt directly, and my ability to rationalize editorial decisions was often insufficient. I suspect that the staff in New York City was as happy as I to see the completion of the three volumes in the project. When the published volumes were being distributed by the Press, I had no means for explaining to authors why they had not received their complimentary copies when other authors had gotten their copies weeks earlier.

The Cambridge History of Religions in America recently won the 2012 PROSE Award for Excellence in Reference (The American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence). Why do you think it won this distinction? What features set it apart from the rest?

I had no prior knowledge regarding this award; nor do I know how the volumes were nominated. Perhaps the Cambridge History was identified for the PROSE Award by virtue of the fact that the volumes range across the full spectrum of religious life in North America without any missionizing tendencies or attempts to argue for the special truth claims of one or another religious tradition. In other words, this work takes seriously the history and views of all of the manifold diverse religious traditions found in America in the past and today. Understanding these religious traditions without prejudice is an important goal of this Cambridge project.

What is the future of reference works in a digital age? How will they change? What value do they provide in a world where information is readily available, often for free and online?

Reference works in the future—whether located physically in public libraries and major research libraries, or available electronically, provide readers with access to both significant data and valuable professional judgments regarding the subject matter. They are not a product of the immediate moment; nor are they driven by the whim of commercial interests which control so much of the information available through electronic media in the digital age. Reference works mark in fixed fashion the views of professionals who have been educated and trained in the particular intricacies of the subject matter under discussion.  They provide contemporary readers and commentators the clearest judgments regarding the subject matter and can be used by general readers and subsequent historians to determine the points of continuity and discontinuity in the thoughts and ideas, the life patterns and the experiences, of the human race. The details regarding the history of America’s religious traditions contained in the Cambridge History are striking proof of the same.

As long as libraries exist, providing reference works to the public will be an important function of libraries. The same function can be carried out electronically when reference works are digitalized.

Cotton is a substance used to make clothing, bags, and other items that are bought and sold globally on a daily basis. But how do we turn that little boll of cotton filled with seeds into something we can use?

Cleaning:

Since around 500 BC, cotton weavers in India often used ginning, bowing, and spinning to clean cotton and turn it into thread and yarn. This initial version of the cotton gin was difficult to use as it only had one roller, often made of wood or metal. First appearing in India, this version, as well as the dual-roller version (off of which Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was based) spread from India to Asia and eventually the European countries. In dual-roller ginning, also known as Churka or Charki, the cotton was pushed through two rollers that spun with the aid of a hand crank, until the seeds were all removed.

After the seeds were taken out with the Charki, the dirt, twigs, and anything else still trapped in the cotton would need to be removed. This was a duty of the Bahna, a person of the caste of those who cleaned cotton. The Bahna would use ginning or bowing (with an instrument called the pinjan, or its smaller counterpart the dhunkara) to do this.

The Bahna would draw a mallet across the bow string, creating vibrations that would help to separate the cotton from the dirt and debris. However, this method was considered clumsy and time-consuming. Eventually, the cotton gin would take over the task of the pinjan and the Bahna caste would be forced to turn to other forms of labor.

The cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney was based off of the charki. This new cotton gin used steel teeth and stronger pulleys to separate fibers from their seeds, making it easier for slaves in North America to work with the short-staple cotton that was more predominant in areas further away from the water.

As the cotton gin became more industrialized, water power was used to increase productivity, and larger versions were created to handle more and more cotton, making the product cheaper while increasing the number of slaves brought from Africa to the Western world—more labor was required to help clean and spin the cotton into thread and cloth.

Spinning:

To spin the cotton fibers into thread, the spinning wheel was used. To do this, the spinner separates the cotton into slender sections which will be twisted until they are the desired thickness. As the sections are twisted into each other, the cotton quickly turns into thread or yarn to be used for making clothing, bags, and other materials. The traditional spinning wheel is still used throughout Asia, but the more commonly seen version is the type used by Western women.

Today, we use industrial cotton gins for cleaning and weaving, although other countries still engage in the traditional forms of cottons cleaning and spinning.

Looming:

Looms are used to make cloth out of thread or yarn by weaving the threads in and out of one another with varying levels of tension. The concept is similar to knitting or crocheting. While hand looms are still used in older countries, industries tend to use mechanical looms to make more product.

For more about cotton, check out Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World by Giorgio Riello.

all images courtesy of wikimedia and gutenberg.org.

In honor of Cotton’s release, we’re hosting a galley giveaway! As historian Giorgio Riello points out in his book, cotton was a global commodity that was traded from East to West and everywhere in between. To test your expertise, guess which country produced these textiles (one country per image); all participants have a chance to win one of three galleys. Post your answers below!

Asia

 


Ceremonial hanging with a hunting scene, late 17th/18th century

Jacket, late 18th century

Decorative hanging used in a royal court, 16th century

Europe

Block printed mezzaro, early 19th century

Hooded cape in black glazed cotton with Indian floral patterns and cotton linings

Giorgio Riello is author of Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World.

From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, Indian textiles were imported by the European East India companies and were sought after by consumers not just in England, but in most European countries. These were not rare exotic goods: Between 1670 and 1760 the English East India Company imported on average around 15 million yards of Indian cotton cloth a year. These textiles were auctioned in the East Indian companies’ headquarters in London, Lorient or Amsterdam and bought by merchants and wholesalers. They were then sold via a variety of tailors, dressmakers, haberdashers, “cheap clothes” warehouses, either as cloth or ready-made garments.

Indian cottons were sought after by European consumers because of their desirable properties. They were the first textiles whose colour could resist washing and did not fade with light. This explains why in 1696 a London merchant advertised his chintzes “cheickered [sic] with a variety of colours, as Red, Yellow, Blew and Green … wears very well in anything you shall think fittouse it for…”. Silks and woollens could not be so easily washed, whilst linens (used mostly for undergarments) were washed more regularly but were mainly appreciated for their whiteness. Indian cottons were also much cheaper than silks and woollens. Though not as long-lasting as woollens, cottons’ short durability was compensated by the fact that they were seen as extremely fashionable.  Their motifs and design were perceived as exotic in the same way in which Chinese porcelain, Japanese lacquer, chinoiserie, and other Asian goods were.

The inroads of Indian cotton textiles into the consuming habits of Europeans also generated resistance. Moralists agreed that Eastern luxuries – and cotton textiles in particular – corrupted the moral fibre of society and made a mockery of the “strange Trollops in Callicoe Gowns” as a 1703 comedy at the London Royal Theatre called such plebeian women wearing colourful Indian cottons. Governments too were anxious. As today Western states wish to limit the import of cheap commodities from China and other Asian countries, so in the late seventeenth century a series of legal acts came first to limit and then to ban the trade and consumption of Indian cotton cloth in an attempt to protect the interest of European woollen, linen and silk manufacturers. Cottons were prohibited first in France (1686), in England (part prohibited in 1702 and totally in 1721), and later elsewhere in the Continent. It is difficult for us to understand the animosity that accompanied the passing of these laws. In London, for instance, after the ban of 1721, several women were stripped naked in the street because they were found wearing forbidden cloth.  A certain Dorothy Orwell was assaulted by weavers in Hoxton in London “who tore, cut, and pull’d off jer Gown and Petticoat by Violence, threatened her with vile Language, and left her naked” in the square. In other cases, women found wearing calicoes, had acid thrown at their clothing, a bitter act reminiscent of assaults on women wearing fur at the end of the twentieth century.

Notwithstanding the opposition of moralists and governments, cotton textiles have become part of our everyday wear. Later in the eighteenth century, they came to be produced in Europe – thus dismissing any xenophobic association – and became both the most important industry of the industrial revolution and the most common material for our clothing and domestic textiles.

Image on left: Furnishing textile displayed in Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada (via Wikimedia)

Image on right: cotton day dress displayed in Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada (via Wikimedia)

For more about Cotton, check out our exclusive Cambridge Book Club features.

The Frontrunners

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

English poet and playwright (we think)

Shakespeareans Say: His name is on the plays.

Doubters Say: Shakespeare arguably lacked the education and knowledge of the aristocratic court and politics seen in his plays.

Origins of Controversy: This was first proposed in 1592, when the first plays by Shakespeare appeared on the English stage.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

English philosopher, essayist, scientist, diplomat, and all-around Renaissance man

Baconians Say: Secret ciphers in the plays reveal Bacon, a clever cryptographer, as the author: the Latin word honorificabilitudinitatibus, in Love’s Labour’s Lost is an anagram for Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi (“These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.”)

Doubters Say: Bacon was probably too preoccupied with his numerous other duties to craft an entire canon for another author (along with a cipher to be included in it) in his spare time

Origins of Controversy: Proposed by Delia Bacon in 1845

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

English poet and playwright

Marlowians Say: Marlowe was an established playwright who created “Shakespearean” blank verse drama years before Shakespeare.

Doubters Say: Marlowe died in 1593—twenty years before the last Shakespeare play was written… (Or did he? Conspiracy theories abound.)

Origins of Controversy: Proposed Wilbur G. Zeigler’s 1895 novel It was Marlowe.

Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1550-1604)

English nobleman

Oxfordians Say: As a nobleman, de Vere was well-versed in history, literature, philosophy, theology, and classics, which scholars claim the grammar school-educated William Shakespeare could not have known well enough to incorporate into his plays. He was also a noted poet and playwright (though none of his reported comedies survive).

Doubters Say: de Vere died in 1604, five years before the shipwreck on which The Tempest is based and the opening of the theatre for which the play’s stage directions are designed.

Origins of Controversy: Proposed by J. Thomas Looney in 1920.

And the More Outlandish…

Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)

Last Tudor Queen of England and Ireland

Elizabeth I died in 1603, making it very difficult for her to write Macbeth, “The Scottish Play,” a celebration for her successor, or any of the other Jacobean plays.

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)

Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

The lost Shakespeare play The History of Cardenio (1613) was most likely based on an episode from Don Quixote. However, it’s very unlikely that he spoke, let alone composed metric poetry in, English. Carlos Fuentes first proposed this theory in 1976.

King James I (1566-1625)

First Stuart King of England and Ireland

Malcolm X argued Shakespeare did not exist because if he had, King James would have commissioned him to write the King James Bible.

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1473-1530)

English political figure and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church

Wolsey was the main antagonist of Henry VIII. However, the real Wolsey also died more than half a century before many of the important events represented in the plays.

What do you think of these contenders? Plausible or outrageous?! Tell us your thoughts below!

Charlie Chaplin: “In the work of the greatest geniuses, humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere, but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare … I am not concerned with who wrote the works of Shakespeare … but I can hardly think it was the Stratford boy.”

Carol Chillington Rutter: “Was…education sufficient to equip Shakespeare to write Shakespeare? Certainly, it was enough to equip any school leaver to read any ‘modern’ English writing: Chaucer, Gower, Holinshed, Hall…and to know how to turn such source material to his own uses. Certainly, too, it was sufficient to equip Jonson to write Jonson: young Ben had only three or four years at Westminster School before being removed to learn his step-father’s trade of bricklaying.”

Mark Twain: “Isn’t it odd, when you think of it, that you may list all of the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotchmen … clear back to the first Tudors…and you can … learn the particulars of the lives of every one of them…except one — the most famous, the most renowned — by far the most illustrious of them all — Shakespeare!”

Stanley Wells: “Gaps in the record…make people uneasy. There are certainly gaps in the records of Shakespeare’s life, but there is nothing unusual about them. We know more about him than about many of his contemporaries, such as John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, John Webster or John Ford.”

Henry James: “I am ‘sort of’ haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.”

Barbara Everett: “Those who saw poetry and drama as a lie…are themselves drawn into a fuller understanding of the great life-lies. For this, Shakespeare must often have been grateful to his own beginnings in provincial small-town Stratford, which taught him to distrust mere art, but to trust true creativity. Those who fail to be able, for snobbish or other ‘ignorant’ reasons, to locate the genius of the work in Shakespeare of Stratford, have failed to do what the editors of the First Folio in their prefatory epistle demanded: which is, that we should ‘Read him.’”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The Egyptian verdict of the Shakespeare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse: Other admirable men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man in wide contrast.”

Matt Kubus: “Even the most sophisticated of readers and thinkers – the Ralph Waldo Emersons of the past and present – rely so heavily on the critical assumption that there is an inherent connection between the author and the content of his works. There is no more credence in saying that the author of Shakespeare’s plays must have visited Vienna, Venice and Athens in order to paint such an illustrious picture of them than there is in saying Dante must have visited the depths of the Inferno, Homer had to have encountered a one-eyed giant, or Milton only could have written Paradise Lost because of his conversations with a talking snake. It is historically and literarily irresponsible to assume that fictions always have and always will be based on actual events.”

Sigmund Freud: “It is undeniably painful to all of us that even now we do not know who was the author of the Comedies, Tragedies and Sonnets of Shakespeare, whether it was in fact the untutored son of the provincial citizen of Stratford, who attained a modest position as an actor in London … ”

James Shapiro: “Oxfordians like to claim that since their candidate had been captured by pirates and had three daughters, he has a better claim, on biographical grounds, to have written Hamlet and King Lear. Yet you never hear a supporter of Oxford’s authorship of Richard III quote Charles Arundel’s contemporary report that Oxford ‘wold often tell my Lord Harrye, my selfe and Sowthewell that he had abused a mare’ and then point to Richard’s famous line about ‘My kingdom for a horse’ as evidence of a deeper and long overlooked romantic attachment.”

Walt Whitman: “I am firm against Shaksper — I mean the Avon man, the actor.”

Roland Emmerich: “I have serious doubts over the Stratford man’s claim to the authorship of the plays attributed to him.”

Paul Edmondson: “There is the loaded assumption that even though one may lack the necessary knowledge and expertise, it is always acceptable to challenge or contradict a knowledgeable and expert authority. It is not. (If the focus of this volume were about a specialized area of nuclear physics those last two sentences would not even have been necessary.) But one characteristic of the Shakespeare authorship discussion is its apparent generosity of scope in which everyone can have their say, ignore the evidence for Shakespeare, propose alternative nominees, contradict authorities and feel empowered.”

So are you on the side of the Shakespeare supporters or the dubious? Have any arguments changed your mind? Tell us who you think wrote the Shakespeare canon below, or use the Twitter hashtag #cbc to talk with other Book Club members.

Chapter 1    The unreadable Delia Bacon

Graham Holderness

By common consensus, among both her admirers and her detractors, Delia Bacon’s pioneering book on Shakespeare authorship, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (1857), is ‘unreadable’. The case she presents, for an alternative theory of Shakespeare authorship, remains unproven, since (as she herself came close to admitting) she could adduce no direct evidence whatsoever to support it. Her work cannot truly be described as comprehensively influential, even within ‘Shakespeare Authorship studies’, as her hypothesis was one of collective and collaborative authorship, whereas virtually all alternative authorship claimants favour a particular individual. Her methodology, which was to elicit from the plays a ‘philosophy’ that could in her view have been understood and expounded only by writers other than William Shakespeare of Stratford, has in the present been superseded, in alternative candidature polemics, by largely biographical readings of the works.

So why should anyone bother to read the writings of Delia Bacon? Why attempt to read the unreadable?

The outlines of Delia Bacon’s life have been thoroughly delineated in some key contemporary studies. I will confine myself to those biographical facts that are relevant to a study of her impact and influence. Born into a cultivated but poor New England background, daughter of a minister, Delia Bacon left school at the age of fourteen and became a schoolteacher. In due course she graduated to teaching adult women, and even lecturing to audiences of women and men in New York. Her initial ventures into writing were of a creative kind: she published some stories, beat Edgar Allan Poe in a newspaper short story competition, and then began writing a play, intended to feature the English star actress Ellen Tree. Bacon clearly felt a strong conflict between her Puritan background and her imaginative bent towards fiction and drama. Eventually the play was published as a work of drama rather than theatre – a ‘dialogue’, ‘not a play’, ‘not intended for the stage’. Around 1845 she began to pursue studies in Shakespeare authorship, driven by a conviction that Shakespeare was not the true author of the works, and that they were in reality written by others.

In America Bacon managed to interest such literary giants as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne in her theories. In 1853 she journeyed to England in search of evidence to prove her case, and met with Thomas Carlyle, who dealt generously with her, though he found her ideas unpalatable. In England she pursued her research, and it was from England that she launched her authorship campaign, in an article ‘William Shakespeare and his Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them’, published anonymously in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1856. After the publication of her book the following year, Delia Bacon was afflicted by a psychological breakdown, repatriated to America, and spent her final years in a sanitorium.

In her Putnam’s essay she systematically laid the foundations of Shakespearian doubt. She claimed, as all alternative authorship proponents claim, that William Shakespeare of Stratford could not possibly have written the plays and poems ascribed to him, for a number of reasons. One was that he apparently did not have the education and experience necessary for their composition, having never attended university, and never travelled abroad. The plays are informed by ‘the highest literary culture of the age’ and Shakespeare of Stratford could not possibly have possessed it. She also found it impossible to believe that a man as devoted to financial and commercial acquisition as Shakespeare could have produced works of such political and philosophical significance.

How could the player’s mercenary motive and the player’s range of learning and experiment give us the key to this new application of the human reason to the human life? How could we understand, from such a source, this new, and strange, and persevering application of thought to life.…

She found it incredible that the author of those works could have gone largely unrecognized and unacknowledged by the great intellectuals of the age; and that such an author could have shown so little concern to publish and preserve the works for posterity.

Hence it follows, not only that William Shakespeare was manifestly not the author of the works attributed to him, but that whoever was the true author, or authors, must have inhabited the higher echelons of Elizabethan and Jacobean society. In Delia Bacon’s work, the aristocratic and courtly characters in Shakespeare’s plays are regarded as the appropriate source for this new ‘philosophy’, which could not conceivably have been within the grasp of uneducated and proletarian actors. The ‘courtly Hamlet’ is contrasted with the group of strolling players he instructs in the third act of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Surely, Bacon argues, the author of Hamlet was more like the Prince than the players?

Condemned to refer the origin of these works to the vulgar, illiterate man who kept the theatre where they were first exhibited, a person of the most ordinary character and aims, compelled to regard them as the result merely of an extraordinary talent for pecuniary speculation in this man, how could we, how could any one, dare to see what is really in them?

…Condemned to look for the author of Hamlet himself – the subtle Hamlet of the university, the courtly Hamlet, ‘the glass of fashion and the mould of form’ – in that dirty, doggish group of players, who come into the scene summoned like a pack of hounds to his service…how could we understand him – the enigmatical Hamlet, with the thought of ages in his foregone conclusions?

Delia Bacon is commonly associated, perhaps simply because of the coincidence of names, with the claim that Lord Bacon was the true author of the Shakespearian œuvre. She did not however argue, as others later did, that the plays were solely the work of Lord Bacon. Indeed, at exactly the same time a separate, and perhaps independent case was being made for Bacon as the sole author, by William Henry Smith. Smith published his own book, Bacon and Shakespeare, the following year, thus coinciding with the publication of Delia Bacon’s. But her argument was quite different from his.

Her case was both more complex and correspondingly more difficult to prove. It was essentially that a ‘school’ of Renaissance intellectuals, including Francis Bacon and led by Sir Walter Ralegh, were responsible for the composition of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare, though their authorship remained cloaked in anonymity. Delia Bacon saw the Elizabethan monarchy, and its Jacobean successor, as a continuum of despotic tyranny, presided over by a paranoid monarch, supported by a repressive civil service and secured by a ruthless secret police. The monarchy and its court were instruments of violent coercion that could tolerate no disloyalty or dissent, and absolutely vetoed freedom of speech. Men such as Ralegh and Bacon, possessed of republican and libertarian ideas that in such conditions were dangerous even to espouse, still more to express, turned to writing plays as a means of covertly disseminating their opinions. Bacon described them as a ‘little clique of disappointed and defeated politicians who undertook to head and organize a popular opposition against the government, and were compelled to retreat from that enterprise’ (p. 15). The one historical juncture where this conspiracy found the courage to raise its head into public visibility was when followers of the Earl of Essex commissioned a performance of Richard II as a precursor of their attempted rebellion in 1601. Normally understood as an attempt by insurrectionists to use the old play, with its depiction of a monarch’s forced abdication, as a rehearsal for the real deposition of Elizabeth I, Delia Bacon saw it rather as the direct programmatic expression of a conspiracy, involving both the aristocratic insurgents, and their intellectual supporters, who were themselves responsible for authorship of the play. But the rebellion was a failure. ‘Driven from one field, they showed themselves in another. Driven from the open field, they fought in secret’ (p. 37). Through the public medium of the theatre, incendiary political ideas could be promulgated to the people, while their true authors could remain protected by a cloak of anonymity. Had the true authorship of the plays become known to the government, both the plays and their authors would have been violently suppressed.

Read or download the full introduction here.