"Sunshine49" [log in to unmask] writes

<<I just finished reading William Kelso's newest book on the recent James
Fort discoveries, and he said that with one exception, every religious relic they
there found was Catholic. So while these first colonists may have been
Anglican, they plainly still harbored Catholic feelings as well. They were not
Puritanical religious zealots. Obviously, their religion was rather ambiguous. Or
flexible.>>

It's worth pointing out that the Church of England in 1607 was only 75 years
old and Henry, had not initially sought to establish a Protestant church per
se but rather, an autonomous Anglo-Catholic church independent of the
jurisdiction of the Church of Rome. It was more of a political than a theological break
initially and it took several decades for the church to evolve into a more
"Protestant" / Reformation inspired form.  Even then, the "Reforms" were more
focused on forms of worship / the prayer book / macro-theological issues and
organizational structure rather than the ritual and accoutrements of the Mass or
articles of personal devotion.

Even Elizabeth I, as the restorer of English Protestantism after the brief
reign of her Catholic older sister, had a crucifix on her altar, as is pointed
out in this ca. 1997 APVA report on the James Fort excavations, which reports
on some of the Catholic artifacts found
http://www.apva.org/pubs/97report.pdf

This article also notes that three  German glassmakers who came to Jamestown
in 1608 may have come from a Catholic area of Germany and there was an Irish
Catholic there for one year in the early days.

So, it's hard to extrapolate from these artifacts that the majority of the
Anglican colonists of Jamestown may have harbored "Catholic" feelings in the
sense of loyalities to the Roman Catholic church. These artifacts might indeed
have been owned by the handful of actual Roman Catholics in the colony.

However, if they were owned by members of the Church of England, neither a
crucifix nor a rosary would have been a personal possession inconsistent with
mainstream Anglican practice in those days, as the established Church was, and
remains to this day, a great deal more "catholic" (with a small "c") than the
various sects of dissenters, including the Puritans who dominated the colony at
Plymouth.

My 2 cents,

Kathryn Coombs
a "whiskey-palian" from King George, VA


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