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Introduction | Wendy Bellion Les essais suivants presentes dans cette etude collaborative sur l’art americain a ses debuts sont tires d’une seance de travail qui a eu lieu lors de la conference « London and the Americas, 1492-1812 ». Celle-ci avait ete organisee par la Society of Early Americanists (SEA) a Kingston University, au Royaume-Uni, en juillet 2014. Pour cette table ronde intitulee « Art Follows Empire », j’avais invite tous les participants a presenter un objet de leur choix. Avec ...

Contrary to popular perceptions, the long eighteenth century was a period of significant church building and the architecture of the Church of England in this era played a critical role in religious vitality and theological formation. While certainly not to the expansive scale of Victorian church construction, the period was an era of significant building, in London, but also across the whole of the British Empire. Anglican churches in this era were marked not so much by stylistic questions as by programmatic concerns. The era produced the auditory church, designed to accommodate better the hearing of the sermon and the increasing importance of music in worship. There were also changes to communion practice that implicated the design of architecture. Finally, some few Anglicans considered the theological implications of historical inspiration but many more considered the role of sensibility and emotion in worship and in architecture as one of worship’s agents.

American material culture scholarship has few compelling models for the study of religion. By focusing on identity, cultural authority, or strategies of social power—all worthy endeavors—the field seems fairly content to consider religion primarily through a Marxist‐informed social lens. Yet, religion is so much more. This essay offers an alternative by examining in four acts—Sacred Geometries, Symbolizing the Supernatural, Seeing “The Word,” and Sensing the Sacred—the material dimensions of religious belief and practice among Anglicans in early South Carolina. The time has come for a more complex and contextualized examination of material religion.

Wendy Bellion │ Introduction The following essays presented in this collaborative study of early American art developed from a session at the conference, “London and the Americas, 1492-1812,” organized by the Society of Early Americanists (SEA) at Kingston University, United Kingdom, in July 2014. For a roundtable entitled “Art Follows Empire,” I invited participants to discuss an object of their choice. The caveat: speakers had to identify a single object that epitomized or problematized the...

Book reviewed in this article: THE HERMENEUTICS OF SACRED ARCHITECTURE: EXPERIENCE, INTERPRETATION, COMPARISON (2 volumes) By Lindsay Jones TEMPLES OF GRACE: THE MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION OF CONNECTICUT'S CHURCHES, 1790–1840 By Gretchen Buggeln WHEN CHURCH BECAME THEATRE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF EVANGELICAL ARCHITECTURE AND WORSHIP IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA By Jeanne Kilde PRAYERS IN STONE: CHRISTIAN SCIENCE ARCHITECTURE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1894–1930 By Paul Eli Ivey SHUL WITH A POOL: THE “SYNAGOGUE-CENTER” IN AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY By David Kaufman MYTHS IN STONE: RELIGIOUS DIMENSIONS OF WASHINGTON, D.C. By Jeffrey F. Meyer UGLY AS SIN: WHY THEY CHANGED OUR CHURCHES FROM SACRED PLACES TO MEETING SPACES AND HOW WE CAN CHANGE THEM BACK AGAIN By Michael S. Rose BUILDING FROM BELIEF: ADVANCE, RETREAT, AND COMPROMISE IN THE REMAKING OF CATHOLIC CHURCH ARCHITECTURE By Michael E. DeSanctis ARCHITECTURE IN COMMUNION: IMPLEMENTING THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL THROUGH LITURGY AND ARCHITECTURE By Steven J. Schloeder

Michael Olmert ; Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies: Outbuildings and the Architecture of Daily Life in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009, 286 pp., 101 b/w illus. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780801447914 Scholars of everyday buildings are notorious for one of two missteps. Some spend so much energy on the minutia of a singular site that they fail to connect that site to prevailing historical narratives and in so doing miss the opportunity to challenge and reshape those narratives. Others spend so much time recording and establishing building typologies that they seem not to explore what those typologies tell us about the human experience. In his well-illustrated book on eighteenth-century outbuildings, Michael Olmert falls victim to neither tendency. Olmert——a specialist in English literature and winner of three Emmy Awards——rightly claims in his introduction that the book's focus is "neither connoisseurship nor aesthetics" (1). In eight chapters, each dedicated to a different eighteenth-century outbuilding type, he provides a general introduction to the common architectural forms and features associated with each type and then animates them by exploring in rich detail the ways these buildings were stages and sometimes tools for the execution of particular tasks essential to everyday life in the eighteenth century. Drawing from rather obvious sources like period documents, archaeology, and the buildings themselves, but also from contemporary prints and early modern literature, Olmert identifies kitchens, laundries, smokehouses, dairies, privies, offices, dovecotes, and icehouses as sites of activity and work. In this book, early outbuildings are endlessly interesting. Olmert opens with a chapter on kitchens. Seventeenth-century …