Fireside Chat- Protestant Relics in Early America

REGISTER

Thursday, November 20th at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

Join us for a book talk with Jamie L. Brummitt, author of Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025). In this talk, Brummitt explores the relationships among material culture, mourning, and gender in early America. Despite the common assumption that mourning is a feminine practice, this talk considers how producing, touching, and keeping relics became an intimate part of masculine mourning practices tied to religion, politics, and citizenship in early America. As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life–including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people–sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington’s Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, postmortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from children’s education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife. As this talk demonstrates, mourning practices became associated with women over time and for specific reasons, but this was not a foregone conclusion. Many early Americans considered mourning to be primarily a masculine practice centered around collecting relics of the dead for religious and political purposes.

Jamie L. Brummitt is an Associate Professor of American religions and material culture at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Brummitt earned her PhD from Duke University. Her book Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025) examines relic veneration, corpse inspection, and the art of mourning in the early United States. In 2017, Brummitt was the recipient of the Anthony N. B. and Beatrice W. B. Garvan Research Fellowship in American Material Culture at The Library Company of Philadelphia. She is also a past fellow of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; the Filson Historical Society; and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.

Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025) is available for purchase with a 30% discount with code AAFLYG6 at Oxford University Press.

Hosted by the Visual Culture Program