Spiritual Spectacles

SALLY M. PROMEY is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland at College Park.

• Foreword by Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. SteinPrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Sense of CrisisPart I: Vision and Image1. From Vision to Image: Continuity in Shaker Experience2. Image and Inconoclasm: Discontinuity in Shaker Experience3. Production and Regulation of Images: The Instruments and the MinistryPart II: Vision, Image, and Space4. Ethics and Aesthetics: In Heaven's Likeness5. Image as Threshold of Heaven: Passing through PicturesPart III: Vision, Image, and Time6. (Re)collecting History: A Visible Genealogy of "Gospel Relations"7. Restoring Relationship: Image as "Visible Presence"Epilogue: The Power of AmbiguityFiguresList of AbbreviationsNotesBibliographyIndex

"Promey's book is a penetrating analysis of Shaker art. Her major thesis is that the apparently contradictory emergence of graphic images in this explicitly nonmaterialistic religious society is, in fact, sensible in terms of the third generation's need for visible (and thereby real) connection to the original charisma of the society's founders. The images, acceptably constructed as a form of Shaker holy writ, conflated the past with the present by making the saints of the earlier era concurrent with the later generation. Promey exquisitely uses dense analysis of Shaker and world sociocultural contexts to clarify the structure, function, and meanings of the images. She appropriately contextualizes the images with regard to important theological and ideological constructs basic to Shakerism, e.g., order and gift. Further, she refines current terminology by embracing many of the heretofore disparate graphic forms within her term gift images. Promey admirably uses Turner's anthropological models of liminality, but she might have benefited from grounding her discussion of charismatic institutionalization in Weberian sociology. The book is a gem, a true advance in Shaker studies, art history, religious history, and cultural history. Highly recommended. General; undergraduate; graduate. —J. B. Wolford, Indiana University"—Purdue Univ., Indianapolis , October 1993