A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690-1776 (review)

Abstract

John Nelson has produced the most significant book on Anglicanism in colonial Virginia since George MacLaren Brydon published his two volumes fifty years ago. This beautifully written, revisionist study will force historians to rethink the shape of colonial religion and Anglican development. For over a century, the dominant perspective on the colonial church belonged to Bishop William Meade, an evangelical Episcopalian in the mid-nineteenth century. His work, Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia, depicted colonial Anglicanism as a spiritual wasteland for clergy and laity alike. Recent historians have challenged Meade's views, but Nelson's prodigious research has buried them forever. While complementing Edward Bond's new book on religion in seventeenth-century Virginia, Nelson revises Dell Upton's perspective on Anglican worship, Edwin Gaustad's estimate of the number of Anglican congregations, and Rhys Isaac's case for dissenter strength on the eve of the Revolution.