Cloth: 978-1-4780-2865-9

Paper: 978-1-4780-3182-6

eISBN: 978-1-4780-9427-2 (OA)

eISBN: 978-1-4780-6083-3 (standard)

The Audacious Ministry of Zilpha Elaw analyzes the life, autobiography, and transatlantic travels of one of the first Black Methodist women ministers in history. A celebrity of her time, hardly any documentation on Zilpha Elaw is left in the historical records of the United States and Britain. In a time before women were allowed to minister in nearly every US Christian denomination, she traveled through the North and South before the Civil War and converted thousands to Methodism before she emigrated to England, where she established another successful itinerant ministry and published a memoir. Kimberly D. Blockett traces the history of misogyny and violence targeting Black worshipers, using Elaw's ever-moving path through the United States and England as a methodology for examining the relationship between geographic spaces, ideology, and subjectivity. By excavating a history purposefully buried into obscurity, The Audacious Ministry of Zilpha Elaw subverts everything we assume we know about race, gender, and faith in nineteenth-century Protestant communities.

Kimberly D. Blockett is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the editor of Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw and Mapping Black Women’s Geographies.

“Kimberly Blockett’s meticulous research into Zilpha Elaw not only provides much-needed information about a literary figure about whom most scholars and students know very little, but also suggests a model for delving into the lives of little-known authors. Blockett offers a fabulous and unexpected story, complex and multi-faceted, of a black woman who embraced itinerancy and defied expectation of her place and role.”
-- Elizabeth McHenry, author of To Make Negro Literature

Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People, African American clergy, Slavery and the church, Methodists, Elaw Zilpha, approximately 1790-1846, England, Race, African American & Black Studies, 19th Century, Cultural & Ethnic Studies, Religion, United States, Social Science, History

License: CC BY-NC 4.0