"A sacred relic kept: Protestant relics and "the good death" experience in nineteenth? century America

By at least the 1830s, evangelical Protestants in the United States considered relic collection and distribution to be an essential part of an individual's "good death" experience. Protestant relics took form as bodily and contact relics. Bodily relics included locks of hair, pictures...

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Bibliographic Details
Subtitles:"Special Issue: Corpses and their material extensions in Protestantism"
Main Author: Brummitt, Jamie L. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Equinox Publishing 2020
In: Body and religion
Year: 2020, Volume: 4, Issue: 2, Pages: 195-224
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B USA / Protestantism / Relic / Commemoration of the dead / History 1800-1900
IxTheo Classification:CB Christian life; spirituality
CE Christian art
KAH Church history 1648-1913; modern history
KBQ North America
KDD Protestant Church
NBK Soteriology
NCB Personal ethics
Further subjects:B Hair
B Memento mori
B Material Religion
B good death
B Civil War Bibles
B Protestantism
B Protestant relics
B religious bodies
B Evangelicalism
B deathbeds
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Description
Summary:By at least the 1830s, evangelical Protestants in the United States considered relic collection and distribution to be an essential part of an individual's "good death" experience. Protestant relics took form as bodily and contact relics. Bodily relics included locks of hair, pictures of bodies that once lived, post-mortem images, and, in rare cases, blood and bones. Contact relics included Bibles, clothes, burial shrouds, letters, and other objects associated with the dead. Evangelical publishers employed the memoir genre to teach children and adults how to distribute these relics on their deathbeds to family and friends. Some evangelical children even modeled handwritten memoirs of their friends after these published accounts. By the mid-nineteenth century, most Anglo-American Protestants regarded relic collection and distribution around the deathbed as a defining feature of evangelicalism. This held true for evangelical women, children, and men. In fact, evangelical men took these deathbed practices with them to war. Civil War soldiers who died away from home insisted on writing deathbed letters to families as part of their good death experiences. These letters usually carried soldiers’ most treasured possessions back home as Protestant relics, including locks of hair, Bibles, and rings.
ISSN:2057-5831
Contains:Enthalten in: Body and religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1558/bar.18285