The Gospel of John Marrant

“Offering new perspectives on eighteenth-century Black religious sensibilities in worlds of encounter and transformation, this exciting book reframes understandings of early Black Atlantic religion. Alphonso F. Saville IV uses John Marrant’s life to demonstrate a much more complex religious world of Black Christianity, leaving readers with new ways of understanding the results for Black people of religious encounter and the emergence of New World Africana religious ways of being. This approach is among the most exciting in the field.” - Judith Weisenfeld, author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration

“Alphonso F. Saville IV’s The Gospel of John Marrant is a pathbreaking study of a leading figure of eighteenth-century African Atlantic literature. Saville’s Marrant is a literary adept at conjure, a form of healing with roots in Africa practiced under enslavement in America and, most strikingly in this book, central to Marrant’s transatlantic publications. For Marrant, the Bible provided less a theology than a formulary, with guidance for healing oneself and one’s community. This remarkable reorientation of Marrant studies toward conjure is sure to stimulate further work.” - John Saillant, author of Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833

"[John Marrant's] story has been told in a number of other works, but it is nowhere better analyzed than in this fascinating study of his multiple influences and modes of interpretation. . . . This is an illuminating text. Essential." - P. Harvey, Choice

"Situating Marrant in this honorable lineage, as well as within the rich tradition of syncretic African American Christianity, Saville’s study is a significant contribution to Black Atlantic studies [and] pushes the boundaries of the field." - Elizabeth Bohls, American Literary History