The Priest and the Prophetess
Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:15th Jun '17
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
By 1791, the French Revolution had spread to Haïti, where slaves and free blacks alike had begun demanding civil rights guaranteed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Enter Romaine-la-Prophétesse, a free black Dominican coffee farmer who dressed in women's clothes and claimed that the Virgin Mary was his godmother. Inspired by mystical revelations from the Holy Mother, he amassed a large and volatile following of insurgents who would go on to sack countless plantations and conquer the coastal cities of Jacmel and Léogâne. For this brief period, Romaine counted as his political adviser the white French Catholic priest and physician Abbé Ouvière, a renaissance man of cunning politics who would go on to become a pioneering figure in early American science and medicine. Brought together by Catholicism and the turmoil of the revolutionary Atlantic, the priest and the prophetess would come to symbolize the enlightenment ideals of freedom and a more just social order in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Drawing on extensive archival research, Terry Rey offers a major contribution to our understanding of Catholic mysticism and traditional African religious practices at the time of the Haitian Revolution and reveals the significant ways in which religion and race intersected in the turbulence and triumphs of revolutionary France, Haïti, and early republican America.
Rey raises important questions about who scholars and Haitians should include in the country's pantheon of national heroes and why. * Erica Johnson Edwards, Associate Professor, Department of History, Francis Marion University, Florence, SC, USA, Journal of Early American History *
The Priest and the Prophetess offers a fascinating glimpse into an understudied figure in Haitian Revolutionary history. Along the way, Rey manages to augment and helpfully complicate narratives of the Haitian Revolution and portrayals of Haitian religion.... The Priest and the Prophetess makes a compelling case for the centrality of Catholicism in the Haitian Revolution. * Reading Religion *
By illumining the Haitian Revolution through Catholic people, ritual, and ideology, Rey has restored a key perspective generally missing from most historical interpretations of this period. The Priest and the Prophetess is an engaging, fresh, and thoughtprovoking read. * Sue Peabody, New West Indian Guide *
The Priest and the Prophetess offers a rich and fascinating story, evocatively told, that gives us new insight into the spiritual, cultural and political meanings of the Haitian Revolution. Through the carefully reconstructed life of the remarkable Romaine Rivière, Rey illuminates a key moment in the religious history of Haiti and the Afro-Atlantic world. * Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution *
Tracing the collaboration and divergence of two remarkable figuresone a defrocked French priest, the other an African-descended prophetessTerry Rey brilliantly illuminates the role of popular Catholicism as an intellectual force in the revolutionary Atlantic world. Along the way, Rey resurrects little-known life histories of the Haitian Revolution. Deeply researched and engagingly written, this is micro-history at its very best. * James H. Sweet, University of Wisconsin, Madison *
ISBN: 9780190625849
Dimensions: 251mm x 183mm x 53mm
Weight: 658g
344 pages