Histrionics of the Pulpit and Trans-Tonalities of Religious Enthusiasm

Deepening the panel’s interest in the politics of representation and satire, Scott Larson’s paper “Histrionics of the Pulpit and Trans-Tonalities of Religious Enthusiasm” develops the concept of trans-tonality to... [ view full abstract ]

Deepening the panel’s interest in the politics of representation and satire, Scott Larson’s paper “Histrionics of the Pulpit and Trans-Tonalities of Religious Enthusiasm” develops the concept of trans-tonality to investigate how the broadly decried “histrionics” of revival preaching might offer new avenues of studying trans histories. Particularly for enlightenment writers, from Kant’s “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy” to Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic ventriloquists, the tone of inspired preaching inflamed the passions and disordered the mind. Here, Larson suggests that this new tone also transformed gender in revival spaces and devotional practices, raising central cultural questions about properly gendered religious tones. Revival trans-tonality appears most clearly in archival records and critical satires of preachers across the 18^th and 19^th century Atlantic. George Whitfield’s critics represented him as a travailing woman, “crying out” and “delivering” those who heard his sermons. Female preachers were deemed masculine in their visage and vocal tone, and the self-proclaimed resurrected genderless spirit, the Public Universal Friend, preached in a voice “grum and shrill.” Moreover, cultural debates over the destabilization of religious tone persist through the nineteenth century, with fears of religious madness, “feminizing” devotional practices, and the political masculinization of evangelical women.