The customs of moderation : Anglicanism and intellectual culture in Virginia from 1676 to 1750

• Main Author: Zambone, Albert Louis
• Published: University of Oxford 2012
• Subjects: 975.502
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.574438

This inquiry centres upon the development of Anglicanism in eighteenth-century Virginia and its influence upon the intellectual culture of the Virginia master-class, the gentry of the colony who possessed an influence disproportionate to their numbers. This clerisy was formed by classical humanism, agricultural practice and agricultural theory, and the English legal and political traditions. But they were also shaped by the doctrine and practice of the Church of England, and by the Church of England's adaptation to a new environment-a new phenomenon best termed 'Virginia Anglicanism'. The influence of Virginia Anglicanism upon the intellectual culture of the elite Virginia gentry represents one expression of religion in the early Enlightenment Era. This Anglicanism was influenced by currents that flowed across the Atlantic from England. It formed one half of what might be called the 'Anglican Atlantic', sharing with Englishmen a political theology and a staunch anti-Catholicism. But Virginia intellectual culture was also preoccupied with nature, with the almost pre-lapsarian land of Virginia, and with the question of why Virginia had never been treated as such an Edenic land demanded. Virginian intellectual culture was bound to England by its similar patterns of worship, but this bond also differentiated it from all of the English colonies to the north, save Maryland. Finally, Virginians, due to the Anglican theological framework, were extraordinarily focused upon moderation in all things, while seemingly rarely achieving it. In sum, Virginians were perennially caught in a dynamic and (sometimes) fruitful tension.