Seeing the Self "in Frame": Early New England Material Practice and Puritan Piety

Author: Promey, Sally M.

Source: Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, Volume 1, Number 1, January 2005 , pp. 10-47(38)

Publisher: Berg Publishers

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Abstract:

I offer here a set of observations about the use of pictures in the Puritan devotional practice of self-examination. Specifically, I consider a cluster of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century gravestone carvings and one oil painting, the Thomas Smith Self-Portrait (c.1670-91). Both kinds of artifacts, on stone and canvas, might well be described as means of "framing" the godly self. If Puritan diaries and journals, elegies and meditative poetry, biographies and autobiographies are literatures of and about the self, the gravestones and portrait painting that constitute my subject facilitate the performance of similar introspective labor. The fact that Thomas Smith likely painted his own resemblance while looking in a mirror represents only the most literal assertion of relations between his picture and the Puritan piety of self-examination. In approaching these material objects as "technologies of the self" (to appropriate a phrasing pursued by Tom Webster with respect to diaries), I also resituate them in particular environments and contexts and in relation to common practices and patterns of vision and behavior. I begin to suggest, furthermore, the intimate connections between these objects-in-place and other pictorial and textual forms of contemporary Puritan manufacture and imagination.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/174322005778054537

Publication date: 2005-01-01

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