Enfilade

From Oxford UP (use code AAFLYG6 for a 30% discount) . . .

Jamie Brummitt, Protestant Relics in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025), 560 pages, ISBN: 978-0197669709, $149.

In Protestant Relics in Early America, Jamie L. Brummitt upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. Brummitt chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered around collecting supernatural memory objects associated with dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends. These objects materialized the real physical presences of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth.

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, post-mortem 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 young women’s education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife.

In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, Brummitt demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather than diminished embodied presence. Moreover, Brummitt reveals how the secular historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down. This book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early American history, religion, politics, art, and popular culture.

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. 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.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: The History and Presence of Protestant Relics
1  From ‘Memorials and Signs’ to ‘Art That Can Immortalize’: The Evangelical Enlightenment’s Influence on Real Presence in Protestant Relic Culture
2  The ‘Precious Relict[s]’ of George Whitefield: Collecting the Supernatural Memory Objects of a Dead Minister and the Spread of Masculine Mourning in Late Eighteenth-Century Evangelicalism
3  The ‘Invaluable Relique[s]’ of George Washington: Sensing the Heavenly Presence of America’s Savior and the Politics of Protestant Relics in the Early Republic
4  ‘The Reign of Embroidered Mourning Pieces: The Rise and Decline of Handmade Relics in Young Protestant Women’s Education and the ‘Feminization’ of Mourning
5  ‘A Sacred Relic Kept’: The Evangelical ‘Good Death’ Experience and Protestant Relics in the Marketplace
6  ‘Protestant Evidence on the Subject of Relics: Catholic Encounters with Protestant Relic Practices and the Christian Roots of American Civil Religion
7  ‘I Was Not a Slave with These Pictured Memorials’: Supernatural Deathbed Experiences as Justifications for Slavery and the Work of Protestant Relics in Black Liberation
8  The Deaths and Afterlives of Protestant Relics: Or, Why Enlightened People Forgot the History and Presence of Protestant Relics

Notes
Bibliography

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Online Talk | Protestant Relics in Early America with Jamie Brummitt
The Library Company of Philadelphia, Thursday, 20 November 2025, 7pm (ET)
Virtual Event | Free
Registration is available here»