Meetinghouses of Early New England

Amazon.com Price: $49.95 (as of 02/05/2019 08:12 PST- Details)

SKU: 9781558499102 Categories: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

Built primarily for public religious exercises, New England’s wood-frame meetinghouses however were closely wedded to the social and cultural fabric of the neighborhood and fulfilled a couple of secular purposes for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the only municipal building in the neighborhood, these structures provided locations for town and parish meetings. They also hosted criminal trials, public punishments and executions, and political and non secular protests, and every so often they served as defensive forts, barracks, hospitals, and places to store gunpowder.

Today few of these once ubiquitous buildings live to tell the tale. Based on site visits and meticulous documentary research, Meetinghouses of Early New England identifies more than 2,200 houses of worship in the region right through the period from 1622 to 1830, bringing many of them to light for the first time.

Within this framework Peter Benes addresses the stunning but in the long run impermanent blossoming of a New England “vernacular” tradition of ecclesiastical/ municipal architecture. He pinpoints the specific European antecedents of the seventeenth-century New England meetinghouse and traces their evolution through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches heavily influenced by an Anglican precedent that made a place of worship a “house of God.” Undertaking a parish-by-parish examination, Benes draws on primary sources―original records, diaries, and up to date commentators―to resolve which religious societies in the region advocated (or resisted) this evolution, tying key shifts in meetinghouse architecture to the region’s shifting liturgical and devotional practices.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » Colonial Period » Meetinghouses of Early New England

Recent Products