“Embodiment” has been a rising theme across the disciplines for the past twenty years, and Faithful Bodies is a fair example of how it has registered in historical scholarship. The book investigates the ways that understandings of race and religion interacted in defining group boundaries and identity among native peoples, European immigrants, and enslaved Africans and creoles in three colonies that were formed under “puritan” or “dissenting Protestant” influence: Bermuda, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. The author proceeds by way of close analysis of “the practices and performances of lived religion, of physical movements and textual presence” (3). To which she aptly, if somewhat speculatively, adds considerations of textual absence at various junctures.

Heather Miyano Kopelson follows this path through a remarkably rich body of original sources—commercial and political archives, church and plantation records, court cases and travelers' accounts, religious and anthropological theory—to arrive at a twofold conclusion. First, compared to the benchmark set by Virginia, colonies shaped by strong puritan influence resisted for much of the seventeenth century the tight conflation of “white” with “Christian” on the one hand and of “Negro/Indian” with “heathen” on the other. But second, from King Philip's War through the centralization of empire in the 1720s, that resistance eroded under both internal and external pressures. The puritans' descendants in New England no longer held out hope that Native and African peoples might be (potential) Christians first of all, while white Bermudians no longer prosecuted enslaved women for sexual offenses, since the women in question had been relegated from a racially ecumenical status of “sinner” to that of mere property.

The major contribution of Faithful Bodies lies in its fine-grained descriptions of behavior, traditions, symbols, material objects, and contexts as these varied from site to site and era to era. (Here is a treasure trove, incidentally, of lecture illustrations bound to intrigue even the most callow undergraduate.) Kopelson's command of detail and careful inference certainly enhances her scholarly authority, and her ability to consistently present action and self-understanding from different points of view across such a wide range of subjects is commendable. Her parlaying of embodiment from the level of personal corporeality out to the “body politic” and the puritans' “body of Christ” captures the full range of realities and interstitial tensions that are part of the story. Finally, her focus on embodied action forces the most jaded scholar to take fresh notice of old sites, and to gain new insight into old stories. The way that their Irish and praying-Indian neighbors registered among New Englanders becomes visceral by way of attention to comparative habits of laundering and hairdressing. Likewise, the “material continuities” (178) that praying Indians maintained with their ancestral way of life by means of adornment and mortuary practices help untangle the otherwise vexed question of how contrary cultures can be blended. Students of colonial law, meanwhile, will be instructed by the author's careful comparison of the canonical statutes regarding racial status enshrined by Virginia in 1662 and 1691 with those of the three colonies under study.

The author's persistence at her approach sometimes spills over into the annoying. For instance, the Quakers' disruption of puritan arrangements is recast here per the Friends' notion of partaking in Christ's “celestial flesh;” yet, over time as they acclimated, “their bodies made fewer tumults in puritan communities” (149). “Their bodies”? How about just “they”? In regard to the role of the Lord's Supper in binding together the puritans' “body of Christ,” Kopelson gives a great deal of attention to all sorts of thoughts and memories (including muscle memories) that might have been triggered in the housewife who had to make the bread for the ceremony. But the most significant earthly element of the sacrament goes entirely missing in this account, namely, the delineation of who would and would not qualify for participation in this crucial marker of the body of Christ as determined by the state of conscience in each individual and the state of unity in the congregation. The latter considerations do not lend themselves so readily to the tropes of embodiment, but that does not reduce their salience.

The book's larger methodological question is just that, an open question that will require engagement by all readers not only during their reading of this book but also as they go forward with their own work. In her own effort to give voice to the traditionally voiceless, the author determines “to peel back the layers” of evidence, “redefining the expanse of the archive to broaden what we may learn of people's stories and lives” (217). This means at times engaging in overt speculation, hypothesizing (in this book, always in a plausible way off traditional evidence) about what a subject might have been thinking, remembering, or otherwise meaning-making in a particular circumstance. This is duly signaled in the text: the words “may have,” “might have,” and “perhaps” appear in this vein eight times on page 180, for instance; five times on page 197. It is up to the reader to determine if the result is worth the effort. But one must at the same time compute the cost of passing by these possibilities in silence.