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Duke University, Graduate Program in Religion, Graduate Student add
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American Religious History, American Religion, Material culture of religion, American Islam, African American Islam, Relics (Religion), and 7 moreVisual Culture of Religion, 19th century American Religious History, Mourning, Evangelicalism, Material Religion, Art and Religion, and American Protestantism edit
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Jamie L. Brummitt is an Assistant Professor of American Religions at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Jam... moreJamie L. Brummitt is an Assistant Professor of American Religions at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Jamie studies the media and materiality of nineteenth-century American Protestantism, especially Protestant relics. She earned her PhD in American Religion from Duke University in May 2018 and holds graduate minors in American Islam, and Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. She is currently revising her dissertation "Protestant Relics: Religion, Objects, and the Art of Mourning in the American Republic" for publication. edit
By at least the 1830s, evangelical Protestants in the United States considered relic collection and distribution to be an essential part of an individual's 'good death' experience. Protestant relics took form as bodily and contact relics.... more
By at least the 1830s, evangelical Protestants in the United States considered relic collection and distribution to be an essential part of an individual's 'good death' experience. Protestant relics took form as bodily and contact relics. Bodily relics included locks of hair, pictures of bodies that once lived, post-mortem images, and, in rare cases, blood and bones. Contact relics included Bibles, clothes, burial shrouds, letters, and other objects associated with the dead. Evangelical publishers employed the memoir genre to teach children and adults how to distribute these relics on their deathbeds to family and friends. Some evangelical children even modeled handwritten memoirs of their friends after these published accounts. By the mid-nineteenth century, most Anglo-American Protestants regarded relic collection and distribution around the deathbed as a defining feature of evangelicalism. This held true for evangelical women, children, and men. In fact, evangelical men took these deathbed practices with them to war. Civil War soldiers who died away from home insisted on writing deathbed letters to families as part of their good death experiences. These letters usually carried soldiers' most treasured possessions back home as Protestant relics, including locks of hair, Bibles, and rings.
Research Interests:
Death Studies, Material culture of religion, Death & Dying (Thanatology), Nineteenth Century United States, Mourning, and 10 moreMemory Studies, American Civil War, Evangelicalism, Relics (Religion), Material Religion, American Protestantism, Bible, Children, Relics and Relic Veneration, and Protestantismo
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This essay examines how the American Civil War (1861–1865) transformed the material nature of the Bible such that some copies did not operate in the ways Anglo-Americans expected them to work as the inspired words of God. According to... more
This essay examines how the American Civil War (1861–1865) transformed the material nature of the Bible such that some copies did not operate in the ways Anglo-Americans expected them to work as the inspired words of God. According to U.S. law, Bibles shipped to the Confederate States were contraband: illegal objects that should be confiscated before reaching enemy hands. Classifying Bibles as contraband led to the widespread notion that Bibles assumed national identities in their work for God. Protestants marked and printed Bibles as war objects that worked specifically for (or against) the Confederate States or the United States. They deployed these Bibles against other Protestants as powerful weapons of God. According to some, Bibles of enemy Protestants operated as immoral books that threatened to undermine God, God’s people, and the military victory of God’s favored nation. Thus, Bibles realized multiple and, sometimes, competing material natures. Confederate and Union Protestants put Bibles to work as powerful objects that mediated God’s presence on earth, materialized debates over slavery, killed enemies, and stopped bullets. Some Bibles functioned simultaneously as God’s Word, commodities, contraband, weapons, shields, and talismans. Each side attempted to hinder the progress and agency of enemy Bibles by capturing volumes as prisoners of war, stealing copies as souvenirs, and destroying books as powerful enemy weapons. The harsh and violent realities of the Civil War initiated a crisis in the material nature of Bibles such that some copies of the Good Book transformed into the Bad Book.
