| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776. By John K. Nelson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xiv, 477 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2663-4.)

John K. Nelson deploys extensive and meticulous archival research to alter a host of current assumptions about religion in colonial Virginia. Instead of depicting early Virginians as religiously indifferent, Anglican clergy as mediocre, congregations as sparse and scattered, and worship as perfunctory, Nelson assembles both quantitative and manuscript evidence, along with a broad coverage of primary and secondary printed sources, to show that the colony had far more congregations than earlier historians have counted and that Anglican parishes, almost always multi-congregational, more than doubled in number between 1725 and 1775. The parishes proved so successful in recruiting clergy that on average after 1725 nine of every ten parishes had a parson in residence, assisted by lay clerks who read the divine service in vacant parishes and at smaller congregations. To maintain this level of religious life, Virginians taxed themselves heavily, spent generously to construct and maintain church buildings, and furnished their ministers with spacious glebe lands for agricultural pursuit. Controlled largely by lay vestries, Anglican churches demonstrated flexibility and adaptability. . . .

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