John Kuhn, "Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network – John Kuhn on “Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England”

Episode Date: March 27, 2026
Host: Jane Degenhardt
Guest: Professor John Kuhn, Binghamton University

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Episode Overview

This episode features host Jane Degenhardt in conversation with Professor John Kuhn about his new book, “Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). The discussion explores how the concept of “paganism” functioned as a flexible, often Christian-imposed umbrella category for non-Abrahamic religions. Kuhn’s book particularly investigates how the London commercial theater helped construct and recycle pagan religious images and rituals on stage, forging popular understanding and ethnographic knowledge of the ‘pagan’ through repeated theatrical set pieces and dramaturgical practices across the 17th century.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Book’s Origin and Approach

• Personal and Intellectual Genesis

  • The project emerged from Kuhn’s dissertation. His initial fascination began with a scene from Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter where Algonquian Indians perform a ritual remarkably similar to Roman altar scenes from earlier plays (03:48).
  • This led to questions about sources, theatrical conventions, and audience expectations:

    “Where is Ben getting the information to put this scene together? ... Is this fresh for this play? Where is the set piece coming from?” (04:23, Kuhn)

  • The inquiry expanded into other repeated set pieces: altar scenes, group suicides, triumphal parades, and conjurer scenes.

• Methodology and Scholarly Motivation

  • Kuhn is committed to “empathetic communing with the past,” reconstructing what the average 17th-century theatergoer may have understood culturally (06:38).
  • He emphasizes breadth over canonicity, engaging a wide array of both well-known and “really, really minor” plays (07:14).

Archival Research and Visual Culture

• Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship

  • The fellowship enabled Kuhn to explore prose genres that addressed paganism: ethnographies, apologetics, travel writing, and histories (09:11, 10:52).
  • Key surprise: Comparative “pagan” theorizing occurred in diverse contexts, not just systematic treatises.

• Images and Illustrations

  • The book integrates visual sources, including the cover image from Grotius’s Defence of the Christian Religion.
  • Kuhn notes that both stagecraft and elite prose works often “lump” disparate groups under “pagan” with homogenizing illustrations—e.g., a feathered American Indigenous figure representing all pagans (11:13).

Theatrical Archive and Analysis

• Cross-Century and Cross-Genre Focus

  • Kuhn avoids strict period boundaries and canonicity, instead tracking set pieces (altar scenes, suicides, triumphs, conjurers) across the 17th century (13:36).
  • Notably, these techniques were adapted from the ancient world to new colonial and African settings.

• Noteworthy Play Example: Philip Massinger

  • Massinger’s works, especially The City Madam, recycle the “Roman triumph” set piece in both ancient and contemporary (London merchant) settings.

    “Messinger is dumping that idea and that practice, like, into contemporary London and suggesting that some of the things that are going on in the kind of merchant classes are starting to look like this sort of barbaric ancient world practice.” (15:12, Kuhn)

Book Structure and Argument

• Organization Around Set Pieces

  • Each chapter traces a different theatrical ritual (e.g., altar, suicide, triumph, conjurer) across the century, emphasizing their persistence and adaptation (19:19).
  • The language and imagery developed by the Admiral’s Men in the 1590s became particularly enduring and influential across later English theater.

• Changing Attitudes and Colonial Context

  • As England’s colonial and slave-trading interests expanded, representations of pagan rituals became more negative—depicting their practitioners as cruel or false (23:41).

    “When pagans are killing themselves in those plays, they're like having visions of hell before they die... The stage got really invested in being like, this is not true.” (23:53, Kuhn)

  • The ‘pagan’ category also gained practical legal significance for colonial law and enslaving practices (25:51).

Contributions to Comparative Religion and Critical Race Studies

• Early Modern Comparative Religion
  • Kuhn pushes scholarly timelines back, showing that comparative religion existed in both elite and popular contexts well before the Enlightenment (26:47).
• Connections to Race
  • Drawing on Barbara Fields’s “racecraft,” Kuhn relates the invention of ‘pagan’ to processes that construct racial categories, but notes ‘pagan’ remained more flexible:

    “Paganism is not really a racial category. ... It's applied to the European past and the African present. ... a much more mutable, slippery label.” (28:16-28:52, Kuhn)

The Category’s Evolution in the 18th Century

• The late 17th century saw a shift in slave law from religious (non-Christian) to racial (Black) categories, reflecting colonial labor demands (29:05):

  “...their criteria for enslaveability used to be non Christian, and overnight they turn it into black, basically.” (29:05)

• ‘Pagan’ as a term of abuse intersected with class and social status as well as religion (31:02).

Scholarly Trajectory and Future Projects

• Kuhn’s ongoing research is turning towards material and technological histories—such as the use of featherwork and hammocks—and a projected book on the birch bark canoe as indigenous technology in colonial North America (33:36).

Memorable Advice for First-Time Authors

• Kuhn’s advice:

  “Pick the [project] that kind of you enjoy doing. ... Because that, that, that will stick with you even when other things might fade.” (36:54, Kuhn)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On pattern recognition and origins:

  “Once you start to notice something, you start to see it everywhere.” (06:06, Degenhardt)

• On the pleasure of research:

  “I do not mind reading large volumes of material that other people might find boring. And I just kind of love digging around in the weeds.” (06:57, Kuhn)

• On theatrical reenactment:

  “There are these really, really expensive and spectacular scenes of pagan religion. Like, what is the stage doing with them? What is their history? What are the politics?” (05:58, Kuhn)

• On legal significance:

  “The term and this idea of like a fourth religious category that’s an umbrella is like immensely useful for colonial law and for like, people who want to enslave other people, basically.” (25:51, Kuhn)

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Suggested Listening (Key Segments)

• Book’s Origin Story: 03:48–06:06
• Methodology and Archive: 06:38–08:04
• Role of Visual Culture: 11:13–13:36
• Discussion of Massinger and Theatrical Set Pieces: 14:54–15:12
• Book’s Structure and Thematic Arcs: 19:19–22:53
• Changing Representations and Legal Ramifications: 23:41–25:51
• Comparative Religion and Race: 26:47–29:05
• Future Projects, Advice to Scholars: 32:49–37:55

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Summary for New Listeners

Through this engaging and deeply researched conversation, Professor Kuhn and Jane Degenhardt illuminate the evolving, constructed nature of “paganism” in early modern England. Kuhn’s book demonstrates how the London stage not only reflected but actively shaped popular categories of religion and difference—often in the service of broader colonial and racial projects. Featuring close readings, archival discoveries, and reflection on current scholarly debates, this episode is an essential resource for anyone interested in early modern theater, the history of religion, colonial studies, or the politics of cultural categorization.

Transcript

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[B]

Network welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Jane degenhardt, and today I'm joined by Professor John Kuhn, an associate professor of English based at Binghamton University. We're sitting down to discuss John's recent book, Making Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England, published at the tail end of 2024 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Making Pagans discusses the category of the pagan in the early modern world, which was more ubiquitous than you might think it would be. In the most basic sense, the word pagan functioned as a sorting device or umbrella term that lumped together religions that were outside of and distinct from the three Abrahamic religions, I.e. christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Kuhn's book demonstrates how the category of paganism drew connections across geographically and temporally estranged cultural sites, for example linking together the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome with the indigenous and black cultures of the New World in Africa. But pagan was always a term imposed by Christians. No one would actually identify themselves as a pagan. And the book really focuses on the important role of the London commercial theater in constructing pagans through stagecraft and recycled set pieces in the 17th century, focusing in particular on English plays by playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Philip Massinger, John Dryden, Aphrabane, and others, making Pagans demonstrates how the theater's staging and restaging of pagan religious rituals produced quasi ethnographic knowledge for popular audiences. I'm so excited to be able to discuss this book with you today. John, thank you so much for making the time to speak with me.

[A]

Thank you so much for having me, Jane. I'm really excited to talk about it. And thank you for that succinct and generous introduction.

[B]

You're very welcome. I would like to start out by asking you about the origin story for your book, both intellectual and personal, and just to invite you to share whatever you'd like about what it was that first drew your attention to pagans and how that seed took root, and you decided that that could become a book.

[A]

Yeah. So I think, like many people's first books, this emerged out of my dissertation. And when I was in graduate school, I remember reading Aphra Behn's the Widow Ranter, which is this late 17th century play that's set in Virginia. And one of the most kind of spectacular and wonderful scenes of the Widow Ranter is this scene where a bunch of Algonquian Indians are dancing around this altar and kind of making sacrifices to it. And at the time I was like, huh, this is really, really interesting. And the thing that is striking me about it is how much it seems like the Roman altar scenes from earlier in the century. And that kind of, like, connection sort of intrigued me. And I started thinking about, like, where is Ben getting the information to put this scene together? And kind of, you know, what is the audience's horizon of expectation? And also, you know, how did the company know how to put together an alter scene? You know, like, is this fresh? This is obviously not fresh for this play. I could see, like, you know, where is. Where is the set piece coming from? So that's kind of where things got started. And then from there, I started looking more broadly at different types of set pieces where pagan ritual was being imagined on stage. So there's a chapter on the author's team, which I just talked about. There's a chapter on group suicides. So in plays, sets of pagans often kind of kill themselves, almost like dominoes falling one after the other. And in those scenes, the people killing themselves often give speeches about the afterlife, like what they imagine will happen, triumphal parades. So these are an ancient Roman form, like the. You bring prisoners and captured plunder into the capital, but in plays, they're, you know, dumped down in Mexico and in Persia and kind of everywhere you could imagine. And then finally, I've got A chapter about conjurers in caves and studies kind of summoning spirits and things. So it started out as just a kind of like a ha moment in one Ephraim play. And then it sort of became a much wider angle project that was interested in, like, you know, there's these really, really expensive and spectacular scenes of pagan religion. Like, what is the stage doing with them? What is their history? You know, what are. What are the politics?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, sort of. Once you start to notice something, you start to see it everywhere. Right. I wonder if you could kind of pan out from that answer and talk a bit more generally. I'm always interested in what motivates scholars and, you know, so if there's anything you want to share about sort of what are your deepest motivations as a scholar? What kinds of questions do you like to ask? What do you care about most? Where do your deepest questions and curiosities tend to come from?

[A]

Yeah, I have a real commitment to the idea that what we do is a sort of like empathetic communing with the past. And one of the things that I'm always trying to do is kind of get inside people's heads in the 17th century, you know, and sort of reconstruct, you know, the horizon of knowledge that like an average person who's going to the theater would have. That's, like, interesting to me. Kind of like cultural. Popular cultural history stuff. And the theaters are obviously an interesting space to think about that. The other thing is I'm a real, I will confess, a real archive hound. So I do not mind reading large volumes of material that other people might find boring. And I just kind of love digging around in the weeds. So one of the things that I was trying to do with the book, and I think Slash Hope sets it aside, is that I cover a lot of play in this book and so really thinking in a wider angle way that's not just, you know, close reading a canonical play another time in a different way. You know, I really am trying to do kind of more aggrav thinking across plays type work, including some really, really minor stuff like, you know, Two Noble Ladies and the Converted Conjurer, a play that I know, Jane, that you know about, but isn't it? Yeah. So in this project, I think trying to take a wider angle view and being kind of indifferent about canonicity, just to kind of reconstruct how the theater is working.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So sort of that longue approach to history, which. One of the things I really admire, though, is that you're also Able to speak very specifically about moments in the plays and do this close reading and formal analysis. And so it's both a kind of long deray approach to history as well as a rigorous kind of close analysis that you're able to combine in your method to the book. I mean, I wanted to ask you maybe more about your archive and just speaking to the deep history that influences your approach. And you were lucky enough to get a long term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I wonder if you could talk about what you discovered there, what your process was like there, whether you went in looking for specific things or whether there were surprises that maybe led you from one thing to the next, if you had any frustrations or challenges in the archives.

[A]

Yeah. So in its dissertation form, the book was really just focused on place and there was a very short, insufficient introduction that kind of tried to situate it in the broader intellectual culture of what's going on in terms of like how people were thinking about other religions that weren't Abrahamic in the 17th century. And so I applied for a fellowship at the Folger to kind of explore the non dramatic landscape. Right. And think about like, you know, the theater's very interested in, quote, pagan ritual, like what's happening in prose genres. Yeah. So I spent the year there reading lots and lots of interesting stuff. And I'd say the biggest discovery was the kind of variety of genres that people. The variety of prose genres in which people were thinking about paganism. So this kind of thought appears in like ethnographies and travel writing to some extent, but also texts like apologetic texts that are, you know, for giving Christians like weapons to defend against these other religious traditions. There's often thoughts of kind of theorizing about the nature of paganism and its history, historical texts about the Middle east, you know, there's. People are really interested in the Pisco site of Palestine is one example of that. Um, so I think what surprised me was, you know, it's not like people are sitting down and being like, I'm writing a book about comparative religion. Right. That that's not something that people are really doing in the 17th century, but that kind of like theories of the history and structure of the world's religions, that material is occurring in all kinds of generic contexts. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And, you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the images in the book which were also taken from some of those sources. I know Grotius's. The of your book is taken from a book by Grotius. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that book and your choice of the images and what the visual does for you throughout the text.

[A]

Yeah. So I was trying to think, as I was reading all these. I was thinking about, okay, the theater is doing this one specific thing where it's like picking particular ritual practices and suggesting that they occurred in lots of places and times by recycling set pieces. Like, to what extent is it the same or different from what's happening in these much more elite, prose, intellectual venues? And so I look both at what's going on in the text themselves, and it's interesting because in the prose work, sometimes they'll pick different rituals that the theater wasn't interested in and suggest that they're. They have, you know, they're common across these pagan sites. They're often much more negative, I'd say, like, much more kind of polemical about pagan material. And they also include illustrations. And I think the. What's happening in the kind of visual culture in these volumes is really interesting and does sometimes sort of mimic what's going on on the stage, where you're getting these collapsing of different groups together, that kind of thing. I call them some texts lump pagans and suggest that they're all the same. And some texts split pagans. And oftentimes in the illustrations, as on the stage, you can see a kind of lumping. And so just to return to Grotius, which is the COVID of the book, Grotius is writing a. It's a text of apologetics, so it's in English. It's called the Defense of the Christian Religion. And it's split into parts. And the first part's about how Christianity is true. And then the remaining three parts are like, here are some talking points you could use to. If you. If you meet any Jews or, you know, Muslims or quote pagans, like, here's how you can kind of discredit their religious practices. And each of those sections has sort of, you know, descriptions of belief systems and histories of these religions. And in the pagan one is almost entirely about Rome and the ancient world, although he occasionally will mention New World stuff. But on the COVID in the illustration, right, it's got the four religions of the world, and there's the pagan in one of the corners. And it's like a feathered indigenous person from the New World. Right. And that's the kind of, like, lumping that I'm really interested in, where you're getting a kind of a homogenized idea of a kind of consistent set of ritual practices. That is being indiscriminately kind of dumped intellectually, like all over the place. Persia, Rome, Africa, the Egyptian. Yeah.

[B]

So interesting. Well, let's talk about your theatrical archive. Let's talk about these plays. One of the things that is unique about your book is that you work across the 17th century, so you don't necessarily observe some of those periodization breaks that a lot of scholars observe. And you also talk about, you mentioned the Two Noble Ladies and the Converted Conjurer, which is one of my favorites, but probably not one that many of our audience has heard of or read. So you deal with a lot of non canonical plays that are nonetheless fantastic and weird and spectacular. So I'm wondering if you can talk about maybe some of those plays and maybe if there's a particular episode you already mentioned, you alluded to a septice from an aphrobn play, but maybe another play, if there's an episode that you can kind of talk the listeners through to give a sense of just how great and wild these plays were and what early modern audiences would have seen and experienced, you know, what we could speculate they may have seen and experienced when watching one of these plays.

[A]

Yeah. So I think, oh, there's so many examples I could talk about, but I'm going to talk about Philip Massinger, who's the subject of like a big chunk of one of my chapters. And I just remember my dissertation committee being like, you have to cut it out with the massager. This chapter of 50 pages on messenger, you could do like 20 pages on mass.

[B]

He's so great, though.

[A]

He's so great. Yeah. And messenger stages a series of plays that have Roman triumphs in them in the kind of 20s and 30s and the kind of. Yeah, so there are these plays where, you know, you've got these processions, captured kings, you know, spoils of war, that kind of thing that appear over and over again in Essinger's work. And the most interesting thing I found was that, and this is, I think, a benefit of focusing on the set piece. Right. Rather than being like, I'm writing about Roman world plays, like. Like I was writing about any play that had a triumph in it. And if you look at Massenger's oeuvre, one of the things that I noticed was that there is a Triumph in the City Madam, which is a city comedy set in London. There's like a weird mock triumph at the apex of the play. And one of the things that I found so striking is that Messengers taking this form that typically audiences would see in pagan plays that's often about cruelty, right? About the kind of success of these pagan empires and the way they take slaves and they subjugate people and, you know, very, these very unchristian political values. And Massinger is dumping that idea and that practice, like, into contemporary London and suggesting that some of the things that are going on in the kind of merchant classes are starting to look like this sort of barbaric ancient world practice. And it's this wonderful moment that I think shows us the flexibility of this language, you know, so it could get put in ancient, the ancient world and it could be attributed to indigenous societies. But you could also use it to talk about Christians, right? You could say, like some of these, like, paganizing practices are creeping in to like commercial London in the 17th century. So the city of Adams is wonderful and I would recommend it to anybody. It's a really bananas play. Yeah. Fabulous Spring starts at the Home Depot and we are bringing the heat to your backyard this season. Fire up the flavor with our wide variety of grills for under $300, like the next grill 4 burner gas grill that's perfect for hosting your spring cookout. Then set the scene and turn your outdoor space into to the go to spot with patio sets for every budget. Bring it this season with grills that deliver flavor and patios that set the vibe from the Home Depot. Start your spring with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. Exclusions apply. See homedepot.com Pricematch for details.

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[B]

Maybe you could talk a bit about the organization of the book. You mentioned a little bit about this, but I think it's important to sort of share with listeners about how each of your chapters is invested in the recycling of an individual set piece across time and across geographical settings. So this also ties into what I was mentioning before, about how your book sweeps across the 17th century and it's doing so in each chapter. So can you talk about what this is showing us as readers and also how does the argument unfold across the entire book at the same time?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So it has a. It's organized around tropes and each chapter picks a single kind of performance set piece, like one of these ritual scenes that appears a lot in different kinds of plays and then traces its history across the century. Um, and I really. I liked that structure because I think it really allows you to ignore canonicity. Right. And just be like, what plays was this actually in? And to tell these a story that's like a long deray kind of account of like how these things are mostly staying the same, but also getting altered in key ways recontextualized in new settings. Um, so each chapter goes across the whole century. But one of the things I show in all four chapters is that this language of stage paganism gets exported into African and indigenous settings in the post war period. So things like John Dryden's the Indian Emperor or the Indian Queen or the. The theatrical adaptation of Aphroben's Orinoco. Right. Are using this older mostly kind of like Persia, Greece, Rome. Language that was familiar to audiences from playset in those places and like importing that into these kind of colonial settings. So that's one of the arcs of the book is kind of ancient world to these other settings. Another thing that I talk about independently in the four chapters is the handling of pagan religion and ritual practices gets more negative as the century goes on. And that kind of coincides with, you know, your people are writing plays that have indigenous and African characters in them who are doing these practices. And it's not like. It's not like it happened all one day in 1671. It's kind of a slower process. But I do trace how playwrights kind of suggest these practices are false or emphasize the. Their barbarity more, you know, as time goes on, I think. And England has these kind of political investments in a certain account of African and indigenous religious practice. These rituals, which sometimes in plays about Greece and Rome were handled quite positively, you Know, I think are kind of undercut in various ways. So. Okay, so the extrapolation of this to African and indigenous settings, the gradually negative or negative handling. And then the other thing I suggest in the book that I didn't understand when I started writing it is that there's four chapters and three of the set pieces that I trace that don't change that much across the course of the century are all developed by the Admiral's men in the 1590s. And so one of the stories the book is telling is not about change. Right. But about the kind of immense shaping force of this kind of 1590s stagecraft that just seems to have developed these, like, really enduring shorthands that get used over and over again and changed in significant way. You know, it's not. They're. It's. They're not totally invariant, but it just, for me, was a really interesting indication of kind of like Marlo Co. And that early Admiral Sen. Moment. Yeah. And the reach of those set pieces. The fourth chapter, three of them are kind of sourced in the 1590s, and the fourth one is Johnson Johnson's the Janus, which is where the alter scene, the altar scene paradigm that's so influential comes out of that moment.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's a really interesting observation. And you pull that out in your conclusion as well. I think it really, you know, gives us. It contributes to the history of theater in important ways and to how we understand the history of repertory. I wonder, going back to what you were saying in terms of the representations get more negative, how does that maybe calibrate with the history of colonialism and England's, you know, kind of developing investments in the New World and in travel and trade and that sort of thing. To what extent does that, do you think, that comes into play?

[A]

Yeah. So just to give a couple examples of, like, more negative handling, and then I'll talk a little bit about the cultural side. So, for example, in suicide scenes, people who are listening may have. May remember, like, Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra. Right. Which has these really noble suicides at the end. And it does kind of suggest that, like, these pagans might see each other in heaven. You know, the play is. Or at least the play is not actively undercutting that possibility. You get similar, like, double suicide, triple suicide scenes in the 1670s, you know, six or seven decades later. And, like, when pagans are killing themselves in those plays, they're like, having visions of hell before they die. Right. So, like, the. The. The stages got really invested in being like, this is not true. Right. This is like if it. Maybe it's still kind of romantic for somebody to kill themselves along with their loved one, but like they have a false religious idea. That's one example. The altar scenes start using human blood or it's like human sacrifice rather than animal sacrifice or incense or whatever, which is more common in the early period. So just ways in which, like pagan religion seems grosser and falser, you know, and I attribute that to kind of conversion pressure in the kind of English colonies and just sort of discrediting indigenous religious practice as part of the sort of push for conversion. And then also as kind of chattel slavery is kicking up and England is getting more involved in the late 17th century. You know, I see this as part of that pro. The kind of, you know, a process of demonizing pagans. And I could talk more about the slavery angle. I mean, one of the key eligibility quote criteria for enslavement in European culture is people being non Christian. Right. You can't say Christians. And I see this as some of the application of these. The ascription of these, like, ritual homologies to African sites as part of that process.

[B]

Yeah. And the. I think again, in your conclusion, you talk about how even though pagan is a totally fictional construction, how it comes to take on a kind of legal significance as a category.

[A]

Yeah. It's not just. I think in the conclusion I'm like, there are some examples of my book that are quite fun. I mean, it's like they're. The anachronism involved is quite amusing. Right. And it, you know, I'm just looking at popular culture, but yeah, the term and this idea of like a fourth religious category that's an umbrella is like immensely useful for colonial law and for like, people who want to enslave other people, basically. Yeah. So it's. It's an idea that's forged in popular culture and in elite writing, but it has these really kind of like on the ground applications in the colonies. Yeah.

[B]

Your book, I think, also makes important contributions to the early modern history of comparative religion and to pre. Modern critical race studies. And I wonder if you want to tell us a little bit about how you understand the contributions it's making to those critical discourses.

[A]

Yeah. So I think there's a. There's an old story about the birth of comparative religion that ties it to the emergence of like, the, like anthropology and other things, the kind of modern social sciences plans and locates that beginning in the Enlightenment. And I think one of the things my book is Doing. Although this is just not. This is not just me. This is like kind of push in religious studies is like looking back a couple centuries before and seeing that there's a lot of comparative religious writing happening both in kind of elite prose, intellectual context and in popular culture. So pushing the date of this stuff backwards is one contribution that's been happening, like, by religious studies scholars. And my book is kind of taking that insight and showing that popular culture is engaged in this process too. And so in some ways it is like, I think, quite akin to some of the work that's been happening in pre modern critical race studies, which is sort of thinking about race as. I mean, this is Barbara Fields argument and racecraft. Right. Is that like race is this sort of invented thing and there's a cultural process. Right. That produces ideas about race. And, you know, I see my work as cognate. Right. As thinking about this sort of very fictionalized religious category to pagan and thinking about how in Christian cultures that's getting made at. In various sites.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

One of. One of the things that I think is so interesting to me thinking about a lot of the really exciting recent work on race, is that paganism is not really a racial category. It's often like LinkedIn to the construction of race. But it's very flexible. Right. It's something that is applied to the European past and the African present. Yeah. And so I see it as a much kind of more mutable, slippery label than some of the kind of more fixed. I don't know, I would need to think more about that.

[B]

But yeah, did. I mean, did it sort of disappear when you get into the 18th century? Or did it continue to be a category that evolved? Like, what happened to the pagan?

[A]

I was thinking about this. There's a wonderful book by Katherine Gerber called Christian Slavery that I think about a lot. And Gerber writes about this period in the late 17th century when basically overnight all of the English colonies rewrite their slave laws and the like. Their criteria for enslaveability used to be non Christian, and overnight they turn it into black, basically. So there's this kind of moment in the late 17th century when like, the criteria for slavery are getting changing from religious to racial, basically. And Gerber is really interested in this transition point and she talks about one of the drivers behind this being slave conversion. So it used to be in the kind of middle of the 17th century that, like, if a slave became Christian, like, you could no longer enslave them. Right. They. They were supposedly entitled to their freedom under this definition, and this is a huge problem for slave owners who, like, want a, like, permanent class of laborers who cannot escape. Right. Who they can exploit. And so I think Gerberner sees the turn from religion to race as, like, from the point of view of these enslavers as a kind of more stable way to keep people trapped. Right? Yeah. That they. It's like, not as sad as she could leave in the same way. So she sees a kind of shift away from ideas like paganism in these contexts as a response to conversion pressures and as a way to kind of, like, strand people in these subjugated labor relations.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, even in the earlier context, was the word pagan ever used as a term of abuse that was sort of intersecting with other kinds of categories like skin color or, like, class or, I don't know, even gender, sexuality, maybe? I'm. I'm just curious.

[A]

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. There's some. Oh there I can think of different ways in. So one thing I often think about is Edward Herbert. So Edward Herbert is. Listeners might have heard of the Renaissance poet George Herbert. He was a kind of devotional poet in the 1630s. And his older brother is this guy, Edward Herbert, who is a sort of philosopher and sometimes regarded as the founder of Deism. And he writes a lot about pagan religious practice and stuff. And both brothers separately comment that, like peasants, like common people, are more likely to have pagan ideas because they, in their telling, like, are closer to the material world and are more likely to think that, like, the world works mechanically rather than like, supernatural. And so they'll often say that, like, peasants are like pagans. You know, there's a kind of class thing going on. That's one. One way in. I view it as. It's like a. I mean, because one of the. And this, your work, I think, is. Is really relevant here. It's. It's a term that is also you quite often used by other Christians. Right. When you. You want to suggest that people are like, no longer Christian. Right. Or like, whatever set of practices you're doing look more like these transgressive non Christian practices. So it's a very flexible term of abuse, you know. Yeah.

[B]

Well, as we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about your scholarly trajectory and how is your scholarship continuing to evolve? How do you imagine this book fits into a longer scholarly trajectory if you want to share what you're working on right now and kind of where your interests seem to be headed?

[A]

Yeah, so I've always kind of been interested in The Atlantic world ever since I was a graduate student. Um, and one of the things that really came up as I was working on this book, like my argument basically about restoration plays with indigenous characters is very much like these scenes of indigenous religious practice are mostly kind of recycled classical or Persian material from the pre war theater. Right. Like there. There's not real correct ethnography happening here. Right. There's not a lot of interest in or direct contact with indigenous religious practices. So that's sort of the argument I make in my book. But one of the things that really struck me as I was writing this is that a handful of these plays do have indigenous made props in them that are being imported from South America.

[B]

Props, yeah, yeah.

[A]

And I was like, so the example I'm thinking of are the two John Dryden plays, the Indian Queen and the Indian Emperor, from the early 1660s. And they have these feather costumes that the priests in the play War that were imported directly from Suriname where they had been traded. Aphroban brought them back and she had obtained them from like Tupi groups in northern South America. I was like, that is interesting. It's like a little bit askance of my argument, which is, you know, sort of like, none of this is real. These are like fake stage Indians that are based on fake stage Romans. But there seemed to be that there was a kind of interesting actual eruption of like real indigenous material culture. Right. And like indigenous labor in the theater. So I, you know, was thinking about that for a long time. And I had also been separately collaborating with a historian, Marcy Norton, on a couple pieces about hammocks. So another kind of indigenous technology that, you know, Europeans had never heard of. And then by two centuries after Columbus, you know, a hammock is on every boat in every European navy. They're being used in European prisons. They have been disseminated across the tropics by traders. So both of these. I have kind of been thinking a lot more about, like, material history and indigenous technology in the early modern period and been very inspired by Norden's work on what she calls subaltern technology, which is the often unacknowledged spread of, like, very useful tech from indigenous groups into European settings in the 17th century. And, you know, Europeans are very anxious to assert their technological superiority. So often they'll kind of downplay, you know, these borrowings. So anyway, I've been kind of writing about featherwork in theatrical contexts and hammocks in various contexts. And this has led me to a bigger project that I'm currently engaged in which is a book on the birch bark canoe in early modern northern North America. So kind of start at Boston, draw a line across the continent and go north is the area I'm looking at. And like the hammock, the canoe is a technology that settlers immediately become reliant on and remain reliant on for centuries. And I'm really interested in that kind of entangled, complicated hybrid tech landscape. So it's more of a kind of material and cultural history. Like I'm moving away, I think from literary studies, but I do think it's has some connections with my earlier work. It's really about stuff, you know, about material, embodied life.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Sounds fascinating. Well, lastly, I, I guess I wanted to ask you about your. Any advice that you have for first time authors. Writing a first book is a lot of work. It's a long process. It's true labor of love. Nobody, you know, very few people get rich off their first academic monograph. What was it that kept you going? What kind of advice do you have for other authors? What did, what do you take from that process that you would want to share?

[A]

My advice is I think sometimes people start from a place of obligation towards their work or sometimes from a political commitment. And both of those are really wonderful things and I think they're a really important part of scholarship. But I would suggest that you start with stuff that you think is fun or like at the end of the day, I do think you have to kind of have an orient, an orientation of like at least curiosity at binibub and at maximum, like joy when you're kind of engaging with your material, even if it's rough material, you know, like, like a. I don't. That is what keeps me going, honestly, the kind of the pleasure of doing it. And I would recommend if you were choosing among projects and you are a graduate student, like pick the one that kind of you enjoy doing. Right. Because that, that, that will, that will stick with you even when other things might fade.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's great advice. Thank you for sharing that and thank you so much for speaking with me today. This has been really illuminating and I'm so glad that we had the chance to talk about your book.

[A]

Thank you so much, Sheena. It's been a real pleasure.

[B]

Yeah. Take care.

[A]

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