Catherine Brekus, HDS Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America, discusses her recent publication, Sarah Osborn’s Collected Writings. David Holland (HDS) and Margaret Bendroth serve as respondents.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Center for the Study of World Religions and to this evening's author discussion by Professor Brekus for her latest book, "Sarah Osborn's Collected Writings." I'm Corey O'Brien. I am the Associate Director here at the Center.
The format for these events is that we will have our discussants speak first. First it will be Peggy and then David and then Catherine will speak. After that, there will be time for questions, in which you can address to all three of our participants.
I'd like now to introduce our very special speakers this evening. Margaret Bendroth has served as Executive Director for The Congregational Library since August 2004. She is the author of several books, including Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to The Present and Fundamentals and The City, Conflict and Division in Boston Churches, 1885 to 1950. Her most recent book, The Last Puritans, Mainline Protestants and The Power of The Past, tells the story of how Congregationalists engage deeply with their denomination's storied past and recast their modern identity. Peggy recently served as President of the American Society of Church History.
David Holland is a John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History. A renowned scholar of American religious history, he casts a broad and inclusive net in understanding the deep intellectual, theological, and cultural currents driving New England church history. He is the author of numerous book reviews, journal articles, and review essays, including From Anne Hutchinson to Horace Bushnell, A New Take on The New England Sequence and A Mixed Construction of Subversion and Conversion, The Complicated Lives and Times of Religious Women. He is the author of Sacred Borders, Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America, published by Oxford University press in 2011. His new projects include a comparative biography of Mary Baker Eddy and Ellen White and a study of the legacy of Perry Miller.
And our author this evening, Professor Catherine Brekus, she is the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America here at Harvard Divinity School and in the Department of American Studies. Her research focuses on the relationship between religion and American culture, with particular emphasis on the history of women, gender, Christianity, and the evangelical movement. Her current interests include the religious history of American exceptionalism and the relationship of Christianity, capitalism, and consumerism in the United States.
She is the author of many articles and books, including Strangers and Pilgrims, Female Preaching in America from 1740 to 1845, which explores the rise of female preaching during the 18th and early 19th century, and Sarah Osborn's World, The Rise of Evangelicalism in Early America, which argues that the evangelical movement emerged in dialogue with the Enlightenment. Professor Brekus has received several awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Henry Luce Faculty Fellowship in theology, and a Pew Faculty Fellowship in religion and American history, among many others. She is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. And in 2014-15, she was named the HDS Outstanding Teacher of The Year. Please join me in welcoming our guests tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much for inviting me to come and speak. I am really here to do two things, I think. And the first is just to salute Cathy for this achievement and for her work as a scholar. And the second is just to maybe just raise a few ideas for discussion about the book.
It's such a pleasure to do the first. We don't often have a chance to do this. I do remember, as a young and timid grad student, having given my first presentation in front of others, you know, male scholars. One of them came up to me and said, I have a graduate student you need to meet. And this was Catherine Brekus.
And I didn't really have the opportunity to. I don't know if you remember this, sitting at the American Society of Church History while you were great with child. I think it was your first. That was a long time ago. And thinking, who is this person?
I've always admired and treasured Cathy for the absolute clarity of her thinking, her knowledge, her discipline, her persistence, the generosity and humanity of her scholarship. Whenever I've had an opportunity to hear Cathy speak, she has that wonderful ability to speak and to put into words persuasively and clearly thoughts that you had kind of rattling around in your brain somewhere but you hadn't been able to put them into words or make them go someplace. So she has this wonderful ability to say something that is utterly common sense, utterly clear, but I'd never thought of it that way. And that's a real gift to all of us.
It's also a pleasure to be here because, like many of us, I have read the biography. And like many of those who've read the biography, I have unfinished business with Sarah Osborn. I just want to say one quick aside I was traveling this weekend. And I was in the airport with my laptop preparing to do a little work on this talk. And someone paged Sarah Osborn.
[LAUGHTER]
So I don't know what to make of that. But I thought that was wonderful, right at that moment.
Like Kathryn Lofton's description of the biography is that it's haunting. And I found that profoundly apt. I can't say that I've got any closure now that I've read this collection, but perhaps I understand now my why. Many of us never will.
So just a few observations and questions for discussion. First, I just want to say that reading through the collection of Sarah's writings, I really had a new appreciation of her as a writer. And there are a few phrases that I jotted down or underlined while I was reading that I intend to use at some point. "Lord, I thought carking care distressed of Thy providential care had been a conquered enemy," carking care.
"This morning the body clogged exceedingly." Oh, who hasn't experienced that? And in regard to conformity to the world, she says how she "is tired with visits, modes, and forms, and flatteries paid to fellow worms."
But what really moved me about her is that she really embraced writing as a spiritual discipline. And the way that she describes it is one of the clearest and most compelling descriptions of that practice that I've read. So I'll just read it for you.
"Oh blessed be God that I have been taught to write. Since that is the means that God has made the most effectual of all other to fix my thoughts on internal things. 'Tis in this way of musing that the fire burns. 'Tis in this way I am prepared for the most solemn acts of secret devotion. If I first attempt to read, my thoughts will rove, except in reviewing past experiences."
I think we all know what that's like. "If I try to meditate, they will still flutter as a bird from bow to bow, but fix on nothing. If I attempt to pray, it is not one time in 10, or scarce, I believe, the year throughout that I can get near and wrestle with God, except I am in this way prepared that I seem to lie under, as is already wrote, the necessity to improve my pen if I will be at all lively in religion."
So Sarah is a writer. Now the question that I kept thinking of, and perhaps when I read the biography and also these writings, is where do we place her? What do we do with this person? And where does she belong? And how does she help us tell a larger story?
Certainly, this is not a woman to be taken lightly. She is not an object of sentimental admiration, someone that we can, at least to my mind, admire as a role model or a proto-feminist. I think those connections are far from clear.
Her case reminds me that historians, and I think especially historians of religion, too easily oversell the possibility of empathy for the people that we write and research about. Somehow that idea of always empathizing with our subjects, especially in many cases, and I think in this case, too, just seems inadequate and perhaps even a bit condescending. I think we should let them be stark and strange and haunting. As Cathy herself has said, that Sarah is more in the mode of a saint, someone with a mysterious gift, spiritual ability. So in some ways, not to be overanalyzed. You just sit there with a respectful pause.
And in fact, when I read the biography, I had the sense continually that her life made the most sense by looking backward rather than forward. That she is testimony, perhaps, to the lingering power of a more ancient spirituality, the spiritual athlete, the holy woman with a passionate desire to God, just destined to be lonely. And so I wouldn't overanalyze that, but just say that history is as much accumulation and accretion as it is change from one thing to the next. And I think that's what I hear in her story.
But at the same time, of course, she is not in an ancient mold. As I read through the collective words, maybe this is something about my own life stage, I found myself wishing for silence, for contemplation, if Sarah had just been able to be contemplative, stop trying to figure out what God was doing at every moment, that torrent of words. And it was important for me, reading the collection, to just make note of the dates. And there were months between each entry. Because after a while, how in the world does someone just keep producing all this over and over.
It's also impossible, I'll just say finally, not to read this book forward. And I should say that I was reading Sarah's writings at the same time, and for no particular reason, as I was reading the new biography of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
[LAUGHTER]
Try that on for size. And so we can't avoid meditating on where we have gone since her time, the world that we are looking at now. That word, "evangelical," what in the world does it mean now? And what in the world connects that PTL phenomenon, whatever we are describing now, with the world of Sarah Osborn?
This has always been a confusing term. And now it's just worse. It's narrow and politicized. Many people are using it very cautiously, disavowing it. And religious historians are kind of looking back and saying, does anything that we've written about evangelicals or their kin at all explain what has been happening?
Or is there some kind of radical discontinuity that happened at some point? You know, perhaps what was "evangelical" even 50 years ago has simply become unmoored under the pressure of tribal politics, consumer capitalism, and this kind of general religious illiteracy that we have. And it's certainly less morally strenuous, less self-critical. We don't talk about suffering as redemptive in any way.
The infiltration, of course, as other scholars have taught us, that prosperity gospel, that suffering is a lack of faith. And many of the differences are simply obvious. But I think that I will also say that paradigms-- this is what I keep telling myself.
Paradigms shift less often than we think they do. And I think it's too early to put a kind of a nice big bow on any analysis of where we are now and how we got there. And in that sense, I think there are continuities, and I say this reverently, between Sarah Osborn and Tammy Faye Bakker. There is a restlessness, a confidence against all odds that the world can and should be remade in their image. And it's a way of being in the world and, of course, not being in it.
I can understand much better going through these collective writings why the title of the biography was Sarah Osborn's World. Sarah's letters and journals give us very little sense, I would say, of that world. Having just read also David Sedaris' diary that's been out there, observing everything, commenting everything.
There's very little churchy stuff. There's little church politics. There's very little about worship or hymnody, even gossip is really not part, unfortunately, of these memoirs.
[LAUGHTER]
In many ways, evangelicals do not come naturally to politics. Anything that has to do with a slow and messy work of changing institutions, the unglamorous work of transforming principalities and powers. And I remember a comment from, and I credit my colleague Patricia Appelbaum, during the discussion of George Whitfield's travels on ship.
George Whitfield's journals, he was this great evangelist in the 18th century. While he was traveling back and forth the Atlantic, in some ways you would not know where he was except his annoyance about the sailors swearing too much. And she compared this with Quaker John Wollman, journals of his own travels, where it's this kind of delight and joy in what he sees. He is entranced by the world. He's observing everything around him.
You could say that Jim and Tammy are entranced by the world. But there's really something completely joyless about their spending. And his downfall, in fact, was that he was unable to stop and enjoy anything that he had done. He just kept overspending, raising more donations, and overspending them again.
So evangelicals, in other words, and I think perhaps this is a theme, and I've been thinking about it myself, they do not really inhabit history, even now, in the way that other people do. Evangelicals read the ancient words of the Bible as if admonitions meant for ancient kings and tribal people apply directly to the world of management consultants and IT professionals, people watching The PTL Club on television. There is a power and there is an immediacy, as Sarah Osborn's writing shows so eloquently, but a deep sense of frustration about how we live in the world that, in many ways, we have all helped create today. So that's what I have to say. And I hope for a chance for some conversation. Congratulations!
[APPLAUSE]
I'm grateful to Peggy for establishing an atmosphere of friendship and collegiality here tonight. Because that's essentially the theme I'd like to pick up on in responding to this remarkable book. I'm going to frame some of my discussion here this evening in the terms of a literary critic named Wayne Booth, who's a University of Chicago landmark and seemed particularly appropriate for tonight given Catherine's long history in Hyde Park.
In an oft cited essay called On The Standards of Moral Taste, which is actually a title that Booth stole from David Hume, Booth took on the question of how a cultural critic should assess works that portray morally repugnant thoughts and actions. How should a reader judge the moral costs and the benefits of work that exposes us, say, to casual violence, or sexual exploitation, or other aspects of inhumanity? Booth provides a number of such considerations about how we might determine whether the moral implications of such a book or the characters in such a book could be positive or negative on the reader.
But he concludes with an analogy that has informed my thinking on this topic for many years, since I first encountered this essay. He writes, in the concluding portions of that essay, "The final ethical judgment of any narrative offering is perhaps best thought of as employing the metaphor of friendship. Does the gift an author offers seem to me like the gift of a friend? Or is it more like that of a con artist, or even a recruiter for [? gain ?] membership. Perhaps the author's gift is, in fact, a packet of poisons, the gift of an enemy.
In other words, a book might be full of dark and difficult things. But for Booth, the collegial friendship of the author helps us assess the moral value of the text. For better or worse, I've often found myself adopting Wayne Booth's standard for assessing the moral value of fiction. In my engagement with works of history, does the author approach the reader as a friend?
Now I need to clarify here. I don't think the metaphor of friendship should imply some kind of retreat from critical engagement with the text. I think true friends are willing, indeed, obligated to share hard truths with each other. In fact, I think the standards of friendship hold us to an even higher standard of truth telling. In the end, I think scholarly friendship means an effort to get the history right, to tell the story correctly for one's reader. But it might mean something more even than that.
I recall, as a young graduate student, chatting with my advisor, whose advisor was a scholar by the name of Perry Miller, whom some of you may be familiar with. I remember my advisor laughingly reminiscing about Miller's tendency to jealously, almost with a touch of paranoia, to guard the sources on which his writing was based. He was, at least in this instance, or in this kind of setting, that is, Miller, reluctant to allow those who might read his books to also share his privileged access to the primary materials that he drew from.
In stark contrast, tonight I think Catherine Brekus has offered up a premium gesture of historiographical friendship, in that she has provided us with remarkable access to the corpus of writings that she spent years to cull and collate. There's an axiom, I think, in humanistic fields of study that the best books don't end conversations, they begin them.
Brekus' work on Osborn's collected writings has not shut down the conversation, although she is the authoritative expert on the woman who has produced these writings. She could have shut down the conversation had she wanted to. But she has rather generously invited us into the discussion about Sarah Osborn, about the relationship of evangelicalism to enlightenment, about dynamics of race and gender in 18th century New England. These sources, provided in the writings of Sarah Osborn, empower the reader rather than disempower the reader, as so many claims to historical expertise often do.
And the editorial apparatus that she surrounds the writings with increase that sense of empowerment for us. Whether it is her diligence in crisscrossing the continent in search of the separated strands of Sarah Osborn's archival legacy, or the laborious effort to read through even crossed out material in the text, to track down scriptural citations and even create a stand alone website for those of us that are more interested in the scriptural sources from which Sarah Osborn drew, or situate Sarah Osborn carefully in her historical context, Brekus' authorial friendship in this text shines through on every page of the volume.
Usually it seems scholars are inclined to write the definitive monograph or the document collection. It's certainly not unheard of, but I think relatively uncommon to offer both and in such rapid sequence as Brekus has done with Sarah Osborn's World and these collected writings that we consider here tonight. And I think the combination of those two, the willingness to speak to us in different keys that both guide and empower the reader, is a particularly noteworthy act of scholarly friendship.
Those familiar with Sarah Osborn's World will find confirmation in these writings for the interpretive arguments that Catherine has promoted in the book, in Sarah Osborn's World. Contrary to earlier readers of Sarah Osborn, like Charles Hambrick-Stowe, who had seen in Osborn a kind of conservative reaction to enlightenment thought of the 18th century, Brekus, as many of you already know, found a woman working in dialogue with, not just in resistance to, the intellectual changes that were swirling around her.
Similarly, Brekus' Osborn challenges the implications of previous writers. As I, again, thought about this argument in reading this volume, I thought about scholars like Mary Beth Norton, Susan Juster, both of whom pit their women characters often in a kind of opposition to enlightenment thought, which they see as creating kind of political and epistemological silences that women had to overcome rather than take advantage of.
Sarah Osborn, rather, used the experiential emphases of her moment not only to find a voice, but to gain a hearing, which are not always the same thing. Her tight intertwining of her faith with the language of sensory evidence and individual identity suggest a woman who found ways to make her faith speak to her present and to the future, even as it sought, in keeping with Stowe's analysis, to preserve cherished truths from the past.
Certainly, there's ample evidence in the collected writings to support the case that Catherine makes in Sarah Osborn's World. But the writings also, and here's where I think the act of friendly generosity kicks in, the writings also invite us to make our own assessments, to critically engage the conclusions that Catherine drew in Sarah Osborn's World. To cite one case in point, we see the traditional interpretations of 18th century evangelicalism in a distinctly complicated form when we can engage the writings for ourselves.
One of those claims is that evangelicalism moves away from a sense of community covenant and toward an emphasis on individual salvation. When we actually read Sarah Osborn's writings, we see a person who is struggling with that change, not one who represents that change clearly. And I think, in fairness, I think Catherine's Sarah Osborn's World suggests that complexity. But it reaches a new level when you're reading Osborn for herself.
Another example-- we often are told that the difference between 18th century evangelicalism and the forms of piety that prevailed in previous generations is the level of certainty that people felt in terms of their own experiential recognition of their status in God's redemptive plan. That is, that we often afford to evangelicals a kind of experiential and empirical certainty in their sense of salvation that smacks more of modern science than traditional spiritual seeking. Here in these writings, in this volume, we can certainly see a significant measure of the certainty, but also the struggle, the wrestle with doubt with which it was being pursued.
One of the most striking passages for me in the memoir of Sarah Osborn is where a man comes to her and claims that she is, I think, quote, "a proud imposter" or "a proud pretender," I think, is the phrase. Because she is claiming to this certainty that we often associate with 18th century pietism. In response, we see Sarah Osborn pushing back on his insults, even as they pushed her into a new moment of introspection.
Could she claim that kind of certainty? What sort of language should she claim it in to respond to those who are resistant to these kinds of epistemological change? To watch a person deal with the push and pull of conceptual change to face the criticisms of those who thought she had gone too far and defined her own voice in response is to see the grand questions of modern epistemology, which historians have an obligation to provide some kind of clarity on, brought into the complicated contradictory and tense writings of one remarkable person.
And no monograph, regardless of how skilled, can convey the rich ambiguities of a person's thoughts in the way that a person's own thoughts might. That is true across subjects, but may be especially true of Sarah Osborn and her world. Precisely because colonial evangelicals, and to Peggy's point, whatever that category means, lived at the convergence of so many competing thoughts. After reading Brekus' able navigation of the paradoxes of Sarah Osborn and Sarah Osborn's World, we now have a chance in this volume to dive in to the writings themselves and make our own judgments about a mind that was simultaneously turned toward assurance and terror, familial love and other worldly devotions, individual piety and community cohesion, a universal sense of humanity, and a constant awareness of her own gender differences, an English identity and a new English vision.
Sarah Osborn lived every day with these tensions. And Brekus has, like a friend, invited us into those crosscurrents with both a chance to swim for ourselves and expert understanding to which we can recur when the complexities and contradictions begin rapidly piling up, as they do. In her memoir, Osborn offers an ironically fitting observation, I think.
"I have always reaped much benefit," she wrote, "by reading the lives and experiences of others." Certainly those interested in a magnified glimpse into 18th century New England and into the early stages of an evangelical movement can reap much of benefit here. There are some remarkable moments in this volume when we counter not only the editorial friendship of Brekus, but also the authorial friendship of Osborn herself.
And here, I would underscore Peggy's point about the limits of critical empathy. Many of us were here a few years ago when the former Archbishop of Canterbury provided us with a stark reminder about just how limited empathy is and the dangers of assuming that we've achieved too much of it. But I think empathy in the way that I'm invoking it here is different from friendship. And in fact, true friendship may be a willingness to recognize the differences that distinguish us as well as those similarities that connect us.
And there are some remarkable moments in this volume when we see, I think, the value of both Catherine Brekus' historiographical friendship and Sarah Osborn's friendship herself, even though it's a form of friendship that we might not be conditioned to recognize or accept. Certainly, we see in Sarah Osborn impulses to friendship in her remarkable correspondence with Susanna Anthony, or even with Reverend Joseph Fish. The language is strikingly effusive when she calls upon them as friends.
"My dear, dear friend," kind of repetition of her affection almost seems at odds with a woman we otherwise know to have been steeled against too much emotion by life's difficulties. It may be that her resolute determination to maintain an emotionally robust friendship with God allowed her to sustain such friendships on the lateral access of her fellow travelers. And that's one of the things I appreciate most about both the biography and about the volume of writings here.
I'm on record elsewhere as saying one of the toughest things for a historian to do is to do justice to the God that lies at the center of the historical subject's lives. And as a kind of marker of that, I pulled the biographies that were near the shelf, near my hand on the shelf as I was thinking about this volume. I pulled out, for instance, Randall Balmer's recent biography of Jimmy Carter, no index entry on God. [LAUGHTER] I looked through Dean Grodzins biography of Theodore Parker, similarly not the same kind of sense of God at the center of Parker's life, which I think is a bit of a distortion.
Then I looked in the index to Sarah Osborn's writing, in which God gets his full due in the index. And it just so happens that I pulled George Marston's biography of Jonathan Edwards off the shelf. And he, too, gets an index, but not as long as Sarah Osborn's to God.
It's a tricky thing to deal with the figure who exists at the heart of this story in a way that's historically in historiographically responsible. Again, I think that's one of the really inestimable contributions of the combination of the biography-- I know you're uncomfortable with the word "biography"-- but of the monograph and in combination with the collected writings. So we get to see Sarah Osborn's own religious life, both through her words and through the eyes of a historian, a particularly sensitive historian, but also one that, because I think of the limits of empathy, can't always get at the heart of her devotional life in the way that her own writings can.
Perhaps the moment when editorial and authorial goodwill converge, that is Catherine Brekus' friendship and Sarah Osborn's friendship converge most pointedly, and perhaps most illuminatingly, is in the death of Samuel, her only son. Here, Osborn struggled mightily to know what might be said about the spiritual status of her child at the time of his death.
The question plagued her. And to borrow Peggy and Katie Lofton's words, haunted her as she sought some parental comfort in his passing, but also refused to say anything to her reader that she could not in good conscience say. [INAUDIBLE]. Brekus helpfully and empathetically guides us through the holographic changes that Osborn made as she struggled to provide the readers of her entries with sound doctrine rather than false hopes, even as her own parental heart was breaking in the process.
In such moments, modern readers might lose sight of the friendship that Osborn authors. That's a world that's difficult for us to recover, in which a mother would not work harder to assure herself of her son's eternal well-being. There's plenty of [INAUDIBLE] in Sarah Osborn moments like this. When I first came to the line where she thanked God for strengthening the hand of Jeffrey Amherst, I had to take a breath and remind myself of the privileges of historical hindsight.
But what we encounter with Osborn is a woman determined to bring her readers into the hard truths of her own life. It was no sugar coating. I think sugar coating can be the act of an enemy rather than a friend. Sarah Osborn refused to indulge in that. Her struggles to find the right words, the right ideas, are usually not for the purposes of obfuscation, but for the sake of accuracy, for the sake of truth, in her mind, I believe, for the sake of friendship.
We might find in her efforts moments of self-delusion and cultural blindness. And in fact, she seems quite self-aware of the potential for delusion. One of the most striking passages for me is when she's reading the Bible and she understands that her own state of mind is a kind of hermeneutically impassible reality. As she engages the text, again, maybe one of the places where she might differ with Tammy Faye is that she questions the clarity of the biblical text for those who are bearing the burdens of their own states of mind.
"In this distress, I went to my Bible and could find nothing but terror there. All I could see were these texts that reaffirmed terror. My eyes were open to nothing else." She understands that even biblical truth is perspectival. And in that sense, she makes for a good modern historian.
But she also understands that her responsibility, even given the cultural limitations of her view, is to provide the truth as she understood it. And I think we see a woman here working hard, even against her own parental instincts to do so. And what she has left behind and the efforts that she made to leave it and the honesty with which she sought to do so signal authorial friendship of the highest sort.
And Brekus, determined to let Osborn's voice resonate over two centuries since her last words were penned, gives us the chance for yet one more gift of friendship. It's interesting to me that the sequence here, I think, is of the value of multiple points of friendship, the historian's and the historical actor's. And not only in this volume, but in its remarkable cooperative impact with the earlier monograph, we get scholarly friendship of the highest kind. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, thanks so much for these responses. And thanks to all of you for being here. I thought I would say just a little bit about how these two books-- there are two of them, maybe I'll just pass this one around-- came to be.
The first book that's being passed around is called Sarah Osborn's World. It's a monograph. It's based on my reading of Osborn's manuscript materials.
I discovered Osborn when I was still a graduate student and I was working on a dissertation about something else and was looking for anything about women in ministry, or women in religious leadership. And looked through the catalog at Yale, this was so long ago that it was actually a card catalog, and saw this little card that said Sarah Osborn, Memoir and Diaries. And I was intrigued. So I started reading.
And I was just transfixed by this woman's voice. The first thing I read was her memoir. She told the story of her life. She didn't know how to punctuate or capitalize. So reading had this kind of stream of consciousness feeling, because words just spilled out on the page.
And what, even in the edited edition you can't get, is what it's like to be holding an 18th century manuscript and to know that the person who wrote it had touched the pages that you were touching. And where you can see somebody's handwriting, I felt as if I could see her emotional state sometimes in the way that she was writing. So she just had a profound effect on me.
And as it turned out, she really didn't fit into the research that I was doing on my dissertation. But I spent a month just reading through her manuscripts and carried her with me until I had finished my first book and decided to go back. And when I went back, I did some research and discovered that the manuscripts that I had seen at Yale were really only a tiny fraction of a huge number of manuscripts that she had left behind. So I ended up traveling to the Newport Historical Society, to the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford, to The Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia-- where did I leave out, American Antiquarian Society in Worcester.
So her writings, after her death, had been scattered. And I think they were read by others as devotional writing. By the time she died, she was really renowned as a very pious woman. I call her, in the book, a Protestant saint. And her writing seemed to have gotten passed around for other people to read for their own devotional reading.
So I spent a lot of time reading these writings, traveling back and forth. I was in Chicago back then. And reading these things in pieces, so half of her 1757 diary is in New Haven and the other half is in Newport, so trying to piece these things together.
And when I was finishing the book and talking to publishers, Yale said, well, why don't you also publish an edition of her writings? And I was thrilled. I was so excited that somebody was interested enough in her, from having read my study of her, that they wanted just a collection of her manuscript writings. So I went back to all these archives and finished up my transcriptions.
This book is actually not even close to a transcription of all of her writings. So actually, Peggy, when you're saying there are months between entries--
Uh oh.
--that's because I only published some. If I had published everything, I probably would have spent the rest of my career doing this. And unless I was going to get a grant and a team of people, sort of like the Jonathan Edwards papers, that was not going to happen.
In terms of what survives, there are about 10 volumes of manuscript diaries. Those are small. The pages are about four by six. She had taken folio pages and cut them into quarters. And then she sewed them together. And you can still see the stitching.
There about 100 letters. Those are folio size. They're very large. And there's also a tract that she published anonymously in 1755.
She was one of the first women to be published in America, especially to be published before her death. Most women, their writings were not published until they died. But there was a minister who read her letter to a friend and thought that it was so spiritually useful that he wanted others to have it. So it was published anonymously. But it was hers.
Her minister, Samuel Hopkins, had all of her manuscripts. Many of them have disappeared. He had all of them after she died. And if his estimate is correct, there might have been as many as 15,000 pages.
So this is a woman for whom writing, I think, was a kind of compulsion. As you described this, there's a torrent of words. And that's the way I experienced it as well. There is an outpouring of words.
And you read the, I think, poignant words, where she describes how this is how she gets close to God. This is the way that she prays and the way that she communicates with God. And so she does this I think almost compulsively, sometimes every day.
It's clear that she gets up very early in the morning. At one point, she turned her bed into kind of a writing space. She had pillows. And she would actually turn and write on her knees in sort of a prayer posture she would be writing.
And as David pointed out, I'm so glad he said this God is always at the center of her pages. These diary entries are, I think, best understood as letters to God. And she often writes to Him in the first person. So I feel as if we're hearing her pray aloud.
So reading her words, for me, was really a powerful experience. And I wanted other people to be able to have access to her words. Even though I'm glad that David appreciates this as an act of generosity and friendship, it makes me a little bit nervous.
Because I read other articles. And I have some sense of what some scholars might do to her words. And I suspect that I won't like it. But I really do want her writings to be accessible and for other people, not only to question my interpretations, but to come up with their own.
I had read her manuscripts maybe for a year before I decided what the book was even about. Because the book could have gone in so many different directions. It was clear the book was going to have to be about God some way. But there were so many things I could write about because her manuscripts were so rich.
There has been a little bit of scholarship on her, some of which I appreciate and some of which I don't appreciate as much. There's an article that is about her reaction to her son's death. This is where I feel as if deep reading of 18th century manuscripts is so crucial.
There's a website actually on the Yale University Press site where I've documented as many of Osborn's biblical citations as I could. And the documents about 100 pages long. The account of her son's death is densely biblical and buried underneath her words which, some of her words can sound sort of flat.
But if you trace what she's referring to, over and over, she's dropping hints that she's thinking about pieces of scripture in which someone is miraculously healed. And so her son has just died. She's afraid to say that he's gone to heaven, because that's a kind of certainty that she can't claim.
And so for some readers, I think they read this and they're just appalled that this woman is not saying that her son has gone to heaven. But if you read deeply and follow the biblical trail, there are all of these stories that she's referring to in which Jesus heals someone, or someone is resurrected, or there's some reason for hope. So I'm hoping that people who read her will try to read her in her 18th century context and really take seriously the Christian faith that informed her writings.
So I think I'll stop there. Because I would love just to have a conversation with all of you.
So any questions?
So just to comment, I have never heard [INAUDIBLE]. But the few lines that were read, it struck me that she was very poetic and she's very mystical. Because I was brought up a Catholic. And people, when they write in that way, have a mystical-- or they kind of fall into what is called a mystical tradition. And I think she writes very poetically. I mean, that's maybe why she doesn't punctuate or [INAUDIBLE].
[LAUGHTER]
She only had one-- she's a very smart woman. But she only had about a year of formal education. And in fact, when this tract of hers was published, she has some correspondence with a minister about how he was going to add the quote, unquote, "pointing," because she didn't know how to do that.
I love the thought of her as sort of a mystic. She, of course, being an 18th century Protestant, detested Catholics. And her minister, it turns out-- and I'm Catholic-- her minister used to begin every service by way of praying for the downfall of Antichrist. And I can only imagine that she's rolling over in her grave that I am the one--
[LAUGHTER]
--who found her writings. I should have said that, you know, one of the reasons I felt so strongly about publishing her words is that on the cover of almost every one of her surviving diaries, she left a notation saying that she had reserved these to the disposal of Providence. And so she wanted people to read her writings.
Some of her writings were passed around, actually, during her life. She showed them to a few close friends and to ministers. But she really was hoping, I think, to convert other people through her writing. She saw them as a kind of form of evangelism. So I think she'd be very happy that her writings are public now.
Catherine, how did the writings get sent to so many different places?
So I'm not entirely clear how her diaries ended up in different archives. They are so old and have belonged to these historical societies for so long that are no provenance records. So I'm sure when you get things now, right, there's always a record that says we got this from such and such a person.
[INAUDIBLE].
No. So there are no records like that. But there are some interesting clues.
There's one manuscript, one of her diaries, actually, on the second page-- at first, I thought it was a scribble. It's someone else's name. Somebody has written their name in the way that you would write your name on a book.
And it turns out that the person who wrote his name was a minister in the Newport church. And so he thought of her diary as just his property. It was past the time that she had died. So there must have been manuscripts in the vault or something.
And there was another case where I can tell from the signature on manuscript that it belonged to someone in North Hampton. And I think that a minister from Newport gave it to her. But how these things ended up in all these different places, I don't know.
One of the things I wondered about when I published the first book is whether anybody would come forward with more manuscripts, which was both something I was hoping for and also terrified about. Because it could be that all my interpretations were wrong. But I haven't heard from anybody.
At one point, I had a graduate student who wrote letters to every manuscript holding archive on the East Coast with a photocopy of one of the manuscript pages, saying do you have any anonymous diaries that look like this? And I got back, you know, funny things telling me, oh, well, don't you know, she published so and so?
Well, yes. I already knew that. But nobody came up with any new diaries. But I thought it was worth trying.
Am I allowed to ask a question?
Sure.
So as an aspiring scholar myself and a teacher of aspiring scholars, I'm always fascinated with this process by which somebody sees something in a source that lots of other people have looked at and not seen. Could you talk a little bit about what it is that gave you the ability to unlock this incredibly rich source that you didn't discover first and that others had commented on, but had not seen ion it what you had seen?
So the main argument of the first book is that the evangelical movement emerged in dialogue to the Enlightenment. It took me a long time to get there. Other people, including David Hempton here had written about evangelicalism and the Enlightenment.
I was not thinking about that at all at first when I was reading her diaries. But the reason I started thinking about that is that there was so much focus on experience, her experience. And there were so many times where it became clear to me that what she was doing was recording her experience so that she would have proof of God's goodness, or of how God was acting in her life.
So there are places in her diary where she will have written, for example, that they have very little money. And she's not sure that they're going to have enough money to buy food. And then, in the margin, she will have come back, say, maybe three years later. And she dates it, saying this prayer was granted.
And so there was this way in which I started to realize that part of the value for her of what she was writing is that it was a way to make God visible. And that the more that she wrote, the more that she brought God into her presence, the more that she felt like God was real. And the more that she could evaluate her experience.
And so that made me start thinking about Locke. And then I had read some of this scholarship on evangelicalism and the Enlightenment. But all of a sudden, I went to it very purposefully. Because it made a lot of sense, all of a sudden, to me.
So David Hempton was right. She wasn't a Methodist. But he was right.
Oh, I would also say, invoking Saints and Strangers, which is your first book on women--
Strangers and Pilgrims.
Oh, gosh.
[LAUGHTER]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
But you know what I mean. But what struck me about that book so powerfully is that you had an ear for [INTERPOSING VOICES] damaged people who were not-- do you know what I mean?
[LAUGHTER]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
So many people--
Like you, Peggy.
[LAUGHTER]
OK. [INAUDIBLE] articulate. But you know what I mean? That so many people had read these biographies of these preachers triumphally, and that they were role models. And what struck me, there was this kind of undercurrent of sadness in that book.
Oh, yeah.
And that's what resonated with me in Sarah Osborn's World and now her personal writings as well. I think emotionally, you were attuned, perhaps, by reading those other [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah. No. It's true. Her reading, her writings in the beginning were hard for me to read.
She was a woman who was chronically ill. I don't know what the illness was. My best guess is probably rheumatoid arthritis. She describes having what she calls [INAUDIBLE] at one point. It could also have been multiple sclerosis.
She was a woman who was very poor. She lost her only child. She lost her first husband when she was very young. And so there is a lot of sadness in her writings.
But part of what really truly took her is that despite this sadness and this voice, which can be so haunting, she continually is affirming that God is good. And it's a remarkable juxtaposition that she's always fighting against despair.
I'm sorry. I was going to follow through the other way [INAUDIBLE] that was so attuned to the process of historical forgetting. Maybe that relates to that first question that I posed, is your ability to recognize the ways in which she has been forgotten, even by people who are looking at the source.
I wanted to address the question about whether we treat our historical subjects with empathy. Or on the other side is, I think you said, strange and distinct, maybe-- I don't know if I'm quoting you correctly-- and how you, Professor Brekus, saw and see Sarah Osborn.
And the reason I ask this is because I remember taking your American religious historical canon years ago when you were working on this book and you talking about reading Sarah Osborn, writing in her diary something about how she was a worm, and she was less than nothing. So I just didn't know if you saw both sides as strange and distinct or empathy, or whether you fell one way or another.
I'm trying to remember which book it is. I think it might be the first one, that probably the second line is about how she's both strange and familiar. Strange because she's an 18th century Calvinist. And one of the things that struck me the most when I started reading her, and it was actually really hard for me, is that on page after page, she says she's vile, she's worthless, she's a worm, she's sinful. She doesn't deserve any of the good things that she has.
At the same time, she's very familiar. Because I think she asked the questions about the meaning of human life that we still ask. So I really resonated with her, because it seemed to me that she was asking universal human questions. But her answers were not necessarily mine.
And so that's where I do want to be-- I really prize empathy. And I was always trying to understand why is she speaking this way? What does it mean to her?
But also having to recognize, I'm not her. And there are certain ways in which there's a gulf between my experience and hers. The way I finally came to terms with all of this self-loathing was to understand it as actually an expression of her appreciation for God's grandeur.
So that the more that she denigrated herself, the more that she was elevating God. And so that helped me to understand better what she was doing. Because the language was painful. And it was just painful to read sometimes. Dan?
Yeah, just picking up on that theme, what's the relationship between empathy for a person and empathy for the tradition within which that person lives? And as you came to a deeper understanding of her as a person, what did that do to your relationship to the theological tradition that was precious to her?
I certainly have a deeper appreciation for the Calvinist tradition and what's beautiful in it. I would say it's still not my tradition. And I'm still at a distance from it. But I can argue for it.
So when I'm in a class with students and they say, this is all terrible and crazy! I'll say, no, it's not. Let me tell you why. And then I become Osborn and try to give voice to her perspective.
But I do feel as if I've learned a lot about that tradition and why it was so meaningful to so many people and why it continues to be so meaningful to people. Because I saw it through her eyes. And I saw how much it meant to her and the way that it sustained her.
At the same time, there is a piece in the first book where I write about how I feel as if her beliefs both healed and wounded her, And I do feel that way, as if there's something here that helps her. But there's also something that is very painful.
And I think you can see it in her wrestling with the death of her son. That she can't say to herself that her son is saved, because that would be sinful. And to me, that was just horrifying.
You use the word compulsive about her writings. Now what did you mean? I mean, clinically or--
I actually do think, given the amount that she uses the word "despair," I think that she probably would, at some points in her life, fall into our modern day category of depression. And I think that writing was the way that she coped with her depression. And at one point, I write about how I was thinking about who would she be now.
You know, she might go see a therapist. And then I thought, well, really, her listener is God. She is pouring out her heart to God.
This is not a therapeutic relationship at all.
Well, but it is a little bit. Because God speaks back to her through the Bible. Right? She knows all the comforting verses in the Bible. Now she also knows the not so comforting ones, too.
[LAUGHTER]
But you know, there are moments where she really is in despair. And I think her very favorite text is the one about though the mountains and hills be removed, God will never forsake me. He'll never leave me or forsake me. She writes this again and again. And so, yes, I think God does speak back to her.
There is a compulsive quality to the writing itself.
Yes.
That it just travels around the same circles over and over.
With the same difficult passages, which is, in some ways, also why it's better that you got an edited version.
[LAUGHTER]
Because in my notes, I would have little notes to myself saying, you know, October 13th, more apple of His eye.
[LAUGHTER]
Because she'd be on the same scriptural references as the past three entries. Yes?
I had a question following up on just the language of the self-loathing and the tradition. And I'm wondering, from a literary perspective, how much of this do you think was about audience expectations and generic expectations? So I understand she didn't get formal education.
But she was very Calvinist. And she would have been thinking, praying, and writing, especially if she wanted, perhaps, some kind of audience and to share her writing in a specific kind of way. Right? So it would have been an expectation that her language would have had those boundaries around it, that she would have had to speak in a certain way.
She would have had to use those traditions. And that would have been the tradition that she would have needed to write in and would have felt most comfortable writing in. So I guess I'm wondering about the tensions that you as an editor might have seen in her writing of that it was her own therapeutic and cathartic process, but also the expectation that there hopefully would be an audience at the other side.
So going back to some of what David said about the individual and the community, when I was writing about her, I was always trying to be attuned to both pieces, her as an individual, but her as an individual whose voice was formed by a community. So when I read her, I'm reading about her experiences. But the language could have been used by so many other evangelicals writing in the 18th century.
She clearly has absorbed literary conventions from other writers, including, I think, some sentimental writers. There are a few places where-- these are the places I tend not to like. Where she plays around with some kind of flowery language, and I think that she was reading some of those sentimental novels, even though she wasn't supposed to be.
Her very good friend, Susanna Anthony, has something in her diary about, you know, God forgive me for wasting an afternoon. I think she was reading "Clarissa." It was about the right time.
So I think her literary voice was formed by reading other people's memoirs. It's certainly formed by her immersion in the King James version of the Bible. Her language is densely, densely biblical.
So I do sometimes-- there are places in her writing where I feel as if she knows the way that she's supposed to write about her experiences. But she also is pressing back against the convention some. So the place where I felt that most acutely is in her memoir when she was writing about her conversion. And this goes to David's point about certainty.
There was a new emphasis on assurance in some of these revival meetings in the 1740s. And there were ministers who were saying that you ought to be absolutely certain. Gilbert Tennent was saying you should be absolutely certain about your conversion. And you ought to be able to say exactly when it happened and where it happened.
And she can't do that. But she feels as if she should. And so you can see it in her writing where she's trying to shape her experiences in a particular way. And then she'll pull back and say, well, actually, I'm not sure it happened exactly like that. And it might have been in a different sequence.
And so I feel as if she's very aware of what the evangelical voice is supposed to sound like and wants to sound like other people, because she really wants to belong to that community. But at the same time, she's an individual person. And her experiences don't exactly match. You must be seeing the same kinds of things [INAUDIBLE].
That's why I asked the question, hoping to know what your response to it was.
Another remarkable woman.
One of the things you write in both books is the ways in which Sarah Osborn made and was made by her world. So I'm wondering if you could say something about how she provides us with an alternate way of looking at historical change and looking at someone who is a contemporary of hers, like George [? Whitfield would. ?]
So part of that impulse behind this book, but also in my larger scholarship where I'm very interested in women's history, is to get people to think in more complex ways about how historical change happens. I think we tend to have top down histories where we look at leaders, and we say this leader had this idea. John Locke said x. And so therefore, these things happened.
I'm more interested in seeing how a John Locke or a George Whitfield was not only a creative thinker. I don't want to take that away from any great leaders in the past. But also how they were responding to everyday life and how part of the reason that, for example, a George Whitfield is so well-known is that so many ordinary people responded to him. So they we're resonating with what he said. Because their experiences actually were according with his.
So by switching the angle of vision to someone like Osborn, I really do want to show that historical transformation comes from ordinary people and that the agency of leaders like George Whitfield or Jonathan Edwards is dependent on the support of ordinary people I think we tend to have this idea that there are brilliant people who come along and their ideas are just so fantastic that people, say, well, that's great. So let's have a revolution. Or I'm now convinced by this.
But in fact, there are many brilliant people whose ideas do not get picked up. And it's the people who emerge out of a context where they're able to articulate what other people are thinking in a stronger way and in a more powerful way, I think they're the ones who become leaders. And so their agency really is dependent on the Sarah Osborns of the world. David?
I have a couple of questions. One is mildly in defense of evangelical spirituality and one mildly attacking it. [LAUGHTER] So the first in a way--
Evangelical disenchantment, perhaps?
Yeah. [INAUDIBLE]. And I can't help thinking, obviously, about her life. And a little bit-- I mean, I read the concluding poem, you know, The Visions of Heaven poem.
And there's a kind of moral grandeur in that poem, I think, where there's a celebration of virtues that, I think, are worth celebrating. And so I guess I keep thinking, like, the virtual history, what would Sarah Osborn have been like [INAUDIBLE] evangelical faith. And so here's a woman who loses her first husband, the death of her only son, her second husband has a breakdown.
There's this terrible illness that the last 20 years of her life is clearly extremely debilitating. So I mean, you can see how that might have played out. Truly, in my life, I wouldn't fancy that too much. Right? so the fact that she gets to this kind of moral grandeur at the end is no mean achievement, whatever the [INAUDIBLE] and worms along the way.
So that's a mild defense. The second thing, though, that I find striking about it, looking at it from a modern gaze, is how she has this kind of Calvinist implicit faith in the provenance of God, but also an implicit faith in the power of prayer to make things happen. And sometimes, you know, the psychological mechanism of that is quite hard to figure out.
And sometimes it does become disturbing. I remember reading one of the letters about smallpox approaching. And it's a kind of, well, you know, maybe smallpox will get me. Maybe it won't.
And this kind of providential side that, you know, God's purposes will be God's purposes and so on. And so at times it feels like a kind of somewhat passive acceptance of the cruelties and terrible things of life. And yet this fervent prayer to make things different is a very strange kind of psychology in evangelical Calvinism that I struggle to understand a little bit. And I was wondering if you've got any insight into it from the letters.
I think you've identified it perfectly. You know, on one hand, she's always saying that she wants to be resigned to God's will. And I don't know how many prayers there are in her writings, let Thy will be done.
At the same time, one of her favorite biblical characters is Jacob. And she often writes about wrestling with God in prayer. And so there are these two sides where I don't see her as passive, because she is always praying and wrestling. But once something happens, she is determined to accept that somehow it was God's will, even if she doesn't entirely understand it.
So why did these people die of smallpox? She doesn't know. But she's going to accept that that was God's will and move forward. And as she moves forward, she's going to pray next time that the smallpox epidemic doesn't kill someone.
So, again, when I talk to students about this, the way that I've made sense of this is that she's more frightened to think that God isn't in control. I think a lot of modern people are more disturbed by the idea that God could wield a smallpox. Whereas she's more afraid that something random could happen that actually isn't under God's control.
And she would prefer to think that all of the evil in the world is actually willed by God than to think that there's anything like an accident. So there are no accidents in her imagination. Everything is providential, even if it's painful.
And that's, I think, where the wounding comes. That means that God inflicts suffering sometimes. And she asks God to inflict suffering on her sometimes.
There are passages in her writings where she says purge me or strike me, purify me because there are there must be some sin in me if these bad things are happening to me. So there is this kind of self-blame that I find painful. But at the same time, I completely agree with you, there's something so beautiful in her writings in which she sees a horizon past this life and says that somehow, God is good, and everything makes sense, even if she can't understand it in that moment. Yes?
[INAUDIBLE] do you see in her personal writings any major [INAUDIBLE] Calvinism [INAUDIBLE]?
So she is actually part of the first great awakening. And she died in 1796. But her writing ceased right after the revolution.
So she did have this debilitating illness during her life. And during the last 20 years, she seemed unable to write anymore. She was almost completely blind. So I think she is most useful for interpreting the first great awakening.
She writes her memoir in 1743. Sometimes I feel like she is like the Forrest Gump of the 18th century. The people who she met--
[LAUGHTER]
--at one point, it's just a little postscript to her friend, Joseph Fish, where she says I was just at the house with Whitfield. And I'm thinking, you were spending time with one of the greatest figures of the 18th century. And she had this massive correspondence with evangelicals, only some of which has survived.
So actually, if anything, where I've had difficulties, I feel as if the Edwards scholars, and for those of you who know about Edwards scholars, I used to work on the Jonathan Edwards project. There are a lot of them. And they're voracious.
And they would like to gather up Sarah Osborn as their own. And I'm pushing back a little bit. Because she read Edwards. Samuel Hopkins was her minister later in her life. But she's not an Edwards acolyte. She's her own person.
Can I just ask you how your being immersed in Sarah Osborn, how it makes you look at the world, where we are now today? [INAUDIBLE] Tammy Faye, [INAUDIBLE].
[LAUGHTER]
I'm kind of joking there. But what perspective does it give you?
So I have sometimes joked that I wish I could get this woman's voice out of my head, you know, in the bad moments. Because her interpretations of bad events are not the ones that I want to hear. I feel as if I have a somewhat complicated relationship with her. But I appreciate her so much.
And one of the things I appreciate most about her is her determination to see goodness in the world always. And that's what I took away from her. And that's what I treasure and keep.
There was someone once at a conference where I was speaking about her. And I was sharing some of the really heart-rending passages. And he raised his hand and said, so if you could go back in time, do you think you could save her?
And my response, it just came back quickly, and it almost sort of shocked me, was, you know, I'm thinking more that she could save me. And maybe both are true. But I certainly don't think I have the answer to her problems. And she might not have the answer to all of mine.
And she does continue to haunt me. I think I'll always have her with me. I feel like I'm better for having met her and spent this time with her and laboring over her writings. I wouldn't trade the years in the archives for anything. She had a sobering perspective on life. But also, I think ultimately, an inspiring one. Yes?
You mentioned during your talk that these men who were her ministers published her work, or something like that. And I'm wondering what her contemporaries saw in her to make her a useful person to publish spiritually. What did she say that made someone inclined to publish the work of this woman who didn't have a lot, and was sick, and didn't have a lot of education? Why was she special to him?
So if I could do time travel, I would love to go back to 1765, when Osborn began holding meetings in her house, which eventually ended up attracting more than 500 people every week. So I should have talked about this earlier.
There was a really a revival that happened in her house. Her minister at the time had become an alcoholic. He was not preaching regularly. And people seemed to start coming to her house in search of spiritual leadership.
And so she was praying with them. She was very careful to say she wasn't preaching. She was reading the Bible.
There were large numbers of enslaved Africans who came on Sunday evenings. There were children who came. On one night she had a meeting just for women. She had a meeting just for men.
And I don't know what she said. But I do know what she said in her writings. And my guess is that she was sharing some of her own trials of faith, that she shared her own stories of suffering. And that she told them what she was always telling herself, which was that God would never forsake them.
So I think that she became a real figure of sanctity. And in some ways, the fact that she had suffered so much was part of the appeal. That here was this woman who had lost so much and yet was still able to talk to people about the glory of God and the goodness of God.
And that's what I think probably attracted enslaved people to her. I think they probably identified with some of her losses. And this was a very hard part of the book for me to write. But I do think that there were Black Calvinists in the 18th century who somehow felt that something good was going to come out of their suffering. And that they chose to think that rather than to think that their suffering was meaningless.
Yes?
What was your biggest unanswered question that you'd like to know about her or you'd like to ask her?
Gosh. There are huge pieces of her life that are missing. I would love to be able to hear what happened in certain years of her life, even decades of her life. I would really like to be able to have a conversation with her about her first husband. I got the sense that he was the great love of her life. And you know, he becomes submerged.
She married for a second time to a man who was about 30 years older than she was. And clearly, he offered her-- well, she hoped he would offer her economic stability. And about a year after they got married, he went bankrupt. And so this is another piece of tragedy.
But Samuel, her first husband, is kind of a shadowy figure. And I just wish that she had written more about him. I also wish that she had written more about Henry, who I found quite endearing in the sense that he just seemed to be behind the scenes, so supportive of her.
She becomes a very controversial figure because there are all these people coming to her house, including slaves. And there are a lot of husbands who would not tolerate that. And he goes to the meetings and sits with her. And I think his presence really helps.
It's an odd thing to write a biography of a woman though you don't know what she looks like.
Yeah.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
There's portraits of a lot of the men, like [? Hopkins. ?]
Yeah.
Do you have a mental image of her? Of course you do.
Well, so yes and no. At one point I was having dreams. But I never would see her face. And I think it says everything about, you know, my subconscious and the way I was thinking about her.
It was always the same dream, where I was seeing her from behind. She was wearing 18th century clothing. And she was walking up, she had a basket, and she was walking up the hill from the harbor towards where her church would have been. So I walked around Newport. I knew exactly where her church was. And so it was a kind of image of her [INAUDIBLE].
But no, I have no idea what she looked like. But she had a lot of marriage proposals. So I'm assuming that she was at least fun to be with in some ways.
Two other things, there are some scratch out in her memoirs. And I remember in the archives when I figured out what they were. They're big X's. And she really tried to make it so you couldn't read underneath.
And this is where I felt intrusive. I got out the magnifying glass and the high-powered light board. And I was trying to see what was behind these cross outs. And in two of the cases, they were marriage proposals from men who were not Christian. And she was ashamed that she had considered marrying men who were not Christian. So she didn't want it to be recorded.
[INTERPOSING VOICES] I have one question, and there's two parts to it. The people that wrote about Sarah Osborn earlier before you came to this work, were they [INAUDIBLE]? And the second part is, do you feel that gender plays into the reading of [INAUDIBLE]? It seemed like it resonated with you very much. And I wondered-- anything more on that?
Yes. Her gender clearly influenced her life. It shaped what she could do and what she couldn't do and how she thought of herself. One of the things that I noticed and that I write about in the first book is that when you read men's and women's memoirs next to each other, both of them are self-deprecating. But women's are even more self-deprecating.
So I actually did a search through all of Whitfield's works, because they're electronically available, for the word "weak." Because "weak" is a word that is all over her writings. And I only found it twice, and once, when he was sick.
[LAUGHTER]
And this to me was a moment where I thought, OK. There is a piece of a gendered difference. So I think that it's something I really wrestle with in the first book.
I appreciated the way that Peggy approached her at the beginning. Some of the scholars who wrote about her that found some of these manuscripts earlier, I think, wanted to claim her as an early feminist. And if we define feminism broadly as a woman who did extraordinary things and did not let her life be determined by convention, then that label fits.
But she never questioned women's subordination to men. She never, for example, demanded the right to vote. It wouldn't even have occurred to her as something to think about.
So there's a historian who I respect very much, Mary Beth Norton, who wrote an early article about Osborn and transcribed one piece of her manuscripts. And as much as I appreciated Norton's article, there was a piece where she said that what she heard in Osborn's writing was a woman who was tired of the drudgery of housework. And I just--
Who wouldn't be?
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah. Yeah, all that laundry and large pots. But I felt as if she didn't really get her. That she was writing in the '70s and had a kind of framework she wanted to put her in.
So there are only a few people who have written about her. Charles Hambrick-Stowe wrote a nice article about her, based on her published writings, where he really saw her as a kind of 18th century Puritan. And I half agree with him. I think she's a Puritan.
But I think she's also pointing towards the future of evangelicalism. Now Tammy Faye Bakker makes me very nervous.
[LAUGHTER]
But I would say that there are, in fact, a lot of continuities between Osborn and other 18th century evangelicals and contemporary evangelicals in the sort of Billy Graham tradition. And one of those similarities is the focus on assurance.
When you look at polling data, Christian Smith, a sociologist, has done some surveys of contemporary evangelicals. And when he has asked them whether they're certain of their salvation, some enormous percentage, you know, 96%, say that they are absolutely certain. Now the reality, I think, is much more complicated. I think the reality is much more like Sarah Osborn, where they want to be certain, and they feel like they should be certain.
But I think that's a value in contemporary evangelicalism that has 18th century roots. And I think also this intense empiricism, where how do you judge whether or not you're saved? Not by some kind of intellectual assent, but by something that you feel that is very heart-centered. And of course, the intense evangelism, I think there are a lot of-- and the biblicism-- there are a lot of pieces that go forward.
But I hope that Sarah Osborn, actually, with all of her humility would be absolutely appalled by televangelists. So that's something to like about her.
That's something else.
Yeah.
Well, we're running out of time. But I just wanted to ask you, if David or maybe if you'd like to say anything at this point?
Just that it's been a pleasure to be a part of the evening. These are words worth celebrating. I'm glad to be a part of it.
Great conversation.
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Thank you very much.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Thanks. Thank you.
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