Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, received the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow in the Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library.
Valeri applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty, and reported the following:
Page 99 provides visual evidence for a major theme in the book. It is taken up by an image of an engraving by Hubert-François Gravelot, which served as the frontispiece of Thomas Broughton’s 1742 An Historical Dictionary of All Religions from the Creation of the World to this Present Time. There is little text to explain, but the reader nonetheless could readily identify the central figures. A statue of a calf, atop a pedestal, marks the top half of the scene. It frames a set of large religious structures in the background: a Catholic cathedral, an Islamic mosque, an Egyptian pyramid, and a classical pagan temple. The middle of the scene is dominated by three figures: Moses with the tablets of the Commandments, Mary with a communion cup and a cross, and Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammad and the figurehead for Shiite Muslims, with a copy of the Qur’an.The Page 99 Test: Heavenly Merchandize.
This image illustrates Broughton’s view of the religions of the world, but the reader would only get the full import of the page by reading the expository text on the two pages that precede and follow 99. The reader of my book will be struck not only by the inclusion of an Islamic figure to illustrate admirable religion but also by the overall point: an Anglican cleric, Broughton, like the other Anglo-American commentators of the mid-eighteenth century, did not validate or excoriate any religion as a whole. They looked for morally commendable traditions within all religions, represented in Gravelot’s engraving by the law of Moses, the piety of Mary, and the moral earnestness of Islam. In contrast, the “idolatrous” figures represent religion-gone-bad, corrupted by priestcraft, irrational zeal, and political power. The image gets to the heart of the argument of the work if read in such terms.
This book traces a change in Anglo-American Protestant perceptions of the religions of the world, and notions of religious conversion, from 1650 to 1765, with special attention to English colonial ventures and missions to Indigenous Americans. It explains the political forces that compelled commentators, including authors of dictionaries of the world’s religions such as Broughton, to abandon previous paradigms according to which all non-Protestant religions were, as a whole, idolatrous, demonic, and seditious. The political circumstances that shaped Broughton’s views, like those of his contemporaries, fostered a robust conception of religious liberty or freedom of religious choice according to moral categories such as toleration and moral reasonableness. This book, then, deals with comparative religions, conversion, missions, and issues of colonial power and race during the English colonization of America.
--Marshal Zeringue
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