| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John K. Nelson. A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2001. Pp. 477. $49.95.

By asserting that Virginia's mother church was the most thoroughgoing religious establishment in colonial British America, John K. Nelson has challenged existing accounts that portray the church as weak and inconsequential. That Virginia's Anglican establishment was an "instrument of the planter elite" and "spiritually ineffective," as evangelicals alleged, is forcefully disputed. Nelson's exhaustive analysis of vestry records revealed that, from England's Glorious Revolution to the American War for Independence, Virginian Anglicanism was vital to the community. Although the range and intensity of its spirituality are inferred, this decentralized, lay-controlled religious body developed an institutional structure adapted to its needs. Alive and vital in 1776, its dismantlement between 1776 and 1790 is beyond the scope of this study. As an institution, it was caught up in a "genuinely revolutionary course of action" (p. 8), the American Revolution, that altered the way Virginians lived. . . .

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