‘I Hear That God Saith Work’: Mortality and Labor in Massachusetts, 1619-1690

Abstract

“‘I Hear That God Saith Work’: Mortality and Labor in Massachusetts, 1619-1690” asks how labor practices were structured, challenged, and transformed by religious beliefs about death on the eastern Atlantic seaboard throughout the seventeenth century. It argues that metaphysical beliefs about death and afterlives had significant, tangible effects on the labor performed by Ninnimissinuok and colonizing English communities alike. This project brings religious histories and labor histories – subjects too often treated as discrete entities in past scholarship focused on early American history – into conversation. This dissertation takes an expansive view of labor, including agricultural, educational, reproductive, manual, and domestic labor alike under its purview. It additionally intervenes in the field of labor history by analyzing aspects of seventeenth century Ninnimissinuok and English religious practice as equivalent forms of labor, positing the category of religious labor as a distinct form of work that merits inclusion in labor and religious histories alike. Synthesizing methodologies and analytic lenses derived from Indigenous studies, queer studies, and disability studies, “‘I Hear That God Saith Work’” strives to imaginatively and creatively reconstruct the ways in which religion and labor were intertwined conceptual categories in seventeenth century Massachusetts. Examining the labor histories embedded in religious histories illuminates how religious beliefs continue to define assumptions about what constitutes productive, sanctioned labor today.