Hearts of Stones: Body and Soul Theology in Massachusetts Cemeteries

In the late seventeenth-century, New England ministers preached a theology about the body that connected the physical person to their supernatural soul through the heart, and this relationship held implications for certain disabilities. God punished some sinners with disabilities while also allowing his most faithful servants to age into disability. As science, the Enlightenment, and religious movements changed interpretations of God's divine providence, the boundary dividing moral and immoral disabled bodies also shifted. In the days of the Salem Witch Trials, sin potentially "hardened" a person's heart, disconnecting their body and soul and leading to physical disabilities as a consequence. As strains of this theology changed, some ministers in the early Republic period saw certain forms of disability as a reminder of God's eternal life. Much like the earlier ministers saw faith as the key to maintain a "soft" heart, post-Revolution gravestones often expounded upon a person's virtues to prove their soul entered heaven.

This poster uses epitaphs and text from stones to show how eighteenth and nineteenth century interpretations of the body, virtue, and morality appeared in cemeteries. These sites of religious expression allowed families and carvers to highlight themes of embodiment in stone. When as stone like William Pool's in 1776 read "in the midst of his usefulness in his family and society", it implied that an older body, or one more likely to be disabled, was not useful. Anthonetta DeGrave's 1810 stone praised that "Her mind was elevated by superior capacity" which implied a hierarchy of cognitive ability. Both refer to the same religious interpretations of the body and soul while justifying the deceased's salvation in religion and non-disability status.

This poster will also used gravestone imagery to demonstrate the presence of this body theology in cemeteries. While ministers warned against the ailment of a "stony" heart, literal hearts of stone adorned graves. Examples of these motifs will demonstrate the variety of interpretations and argue that certain depictions of the iconic death's head of colonial New England, also implied a heart. Even if the carver did not intend to make a heart, the indent in the winged skull on William Fisk's 1727 clearly appears as one. Fisk regretted his role as a juror who convicted Rebecca Nurse, and more than any other case, the idea of disability and the heart shaped her accusation and trial. Other explicit references like the heart and scythe on Charles Harenton's 1810 stone demonstrates the continual meaning of this iconography.