ADAMS, HANNAH

ADAMS, HANNAH . Well known in New England during her lifetime, Hannah Adams (1755–1831) has been remembered, if at all, as the first American-born woman to earn her living by writing. However, she also has a preeminent place in the history of the study of religion. Adams wrote three theological and didactic books: The Truth and Excellence of the Christian Religion Exhibited (1804), which offered biographical sketches of "eminent" lay Christians; Concise Account of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews (1816), which exhorted Americans to evangelize the "lost sheep of the house of Israel"; and Letters on the Gospels (1824), which aimed to help young people "read the New Testament with more pleasure and advantage." As these texts indicate, Adams shared a great deal with other theological liberals during the Early National period. A Congregationalist who sided with the Unitarians, Adams favored a supernatural rationalism that endorsed both reason and revelation as sources of religious authority. She bubbled with a millennialist optimism that supported missionary outreach, but also championed "religious liberty," bemoaned sectarianism, and condemned intolerance.

Impatience with intolerance—as well as poverty and curiosity—prompted her first and most important contribution to the study of religion. She started it after becoming "disgusted by the want of candor" in Thomas Broughton's Historical Dictionary of All Religions (1742). In 1778, Adams began researching and writing her Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, a survey of religions that first appeared in 1784 (as Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects ) and went through four American editions and several British editions. Scholars of U.S. Judaism have taken note of her two-volume History of the Jews (1812) because it drew on correspondence with Jewish leaders to offer an important account of Judaism in the United States (Adams, 1812, vol. 2, pp. 204–220). However, it was Adams's Dictionary, especially the fourth edition of 1817, that secured her a preeminent place in the history of the study of religion. Trying to avoid Broughton's pejorative accounts and dismissive labels, Adams not only offered a glimpse of the increasing religious diversity of Early National America, but she also provided an angle of vision on the wider religious world.

The resourceful Adams used varied sources of information. She wrote to religious leaders, including the Catholic bishop John Carroll, and visited some groups, including the Swedenborgians. She also mined depositories of official documents, as she did when researching New England history. Adams had studied Latin and Greek, but she primarily relied on secondary sources in English that she found in bookshops and libraries, including the personal library of former president John Adams, a distant relative, and the collection at the Boston Athenaeum, where Chester Harding's oil painting of her still hangs.

Using the classification scheme that predominated at the time, Adams considered four broad categories of religions: Jews, Muslims, heathens, and Christians. The latter received disproportionate attention: 85 percent of the more than seven hundred entries covered Christian ideas and groups. However, she considered other religions more fully and less dismissively than Broughton. The dictionary format itself—unlike Broughton's thematic organization—conveyed to readers that all religions were on the same footing, and Adams included a number of entries on non-Christian traditions, including eleven on Judaism, six on Islam, five on indigenous religions, and four on Zoroastrianism. She also penned eleven entries on religions in East and South Asia, including Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shintō.

However, it is Adams's approach that seems most noteworthy. She set out four methodological "rules," guidelines that anticipated those advocated by some later interpreters of religion. First, she aimed "to avoid giving the least preference of one denomination above another." That meant, for Adams, omitting passages where authors "pass judgment" and rejecting denigrating labels such as "Heretics, Schismatics, Enthusiasts, Fanatics," and so on. Second, she resolved to let adherents speak for themselves, taking accounts of religions and sects "from their own authors." Third, she aimed to identify the "general collective sense" of each tradition, thereby avoiding descriptions that take a marginal group to represent the larger tradition. Fourth, Adams announced that she would "take the utmost care not to misrepresent the ideas" of authors.

Adams was not able to "avoid giving the least preference." As with all scholars of religion, her social location and personal convictions shaped her interpretations. In the volume's introduction, which described the religious world at the time of Jesus, she noted that the "heathens" venerated many gods. To explain that diversity, Adams recounted naturalist and euhemerist theories of the origin of religion: the gods originated in encounters with nature or in the propensity to deify heroes. Yet none of the non-Christian faiths, including Judaism, were as lofty as the tradition initiated by Jesus. "Christianity broke forth from the east like a rising sun," Adams suggested, "and dispelled the universal darkness which obscured every part of the globe" (Adams, 1992, p. 11). In this passage from the introduction, and in some entries, Adams revealed her theological commitments. She sometimes recorded, almost word for word, misleading or negative descriptions. She sometimes seemed blind to the ways a borrowed phrase violated her commitment to fair representation. Yet, to her credit, Adams never treated a religion or sect more negatively than her sources, and when a British edition added denigrating labels and phrases she deleted them in the subsequent American edition. Most important, she anticipated later developments by prescribing a critical and judicious approach to the comparative study of religion. Louis Henry Jordan, who wrote an early history of the field, listed Adams as the only American included among the "prophets and pioneers" (Jordan, 1986, pp. 146–150). Even if most subsequent histories have overlooked Adams or minimized her contributions—and those of other women—Jordan's assessment still seems appropriate. If we consider the historical context—not to mention the obstacles she faced as the first American woman to earn her living by writing—Adams's Dictionary seems to be "a really notable undertaking" (Jordan, 1986, p. 149).

Bibliography

Adams, Hannah. Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects Which Have Appeared from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day. Boston, 1784.

Adams, Hannah. The Truth and Excellence of the Christian Religion Exhibited. Boston, 1804.

Adams, Hannah. The History of the Jews from the Destruction of the Temple to the Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. Boston, 1812.

Adams, Hannah. A Concise Account of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews. Boston, 1816.

Adams, Hannah. Letters on the Gospels. Cambridge, U.K., 1824.

Adams, Hannah. A Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams, Written by Herself with Additional Notices by a Friend. Boston, 1832.

Adams, Hannah. A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, Jewish, Heathen, Mahometan, and Christian, Ancient and Modern (4th ed., 1817). Introduction by Thomas A. Tweed. Atlanta, 1992.

Broughton, Thomas. An Historical Dictionary of All Religions from the Creation of the World to This Perfect Time. London, 1742.

Jackson, Carl. Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth Century Explorations. Westport, Conn., 1981. Jackson's history of the American encounter with Asian thought from the late eighteenth century to the Parliament of Religions in 1893 includes a three-page account of Hannah Adams's work (pp. 16–19).

Jordan, Louis Henry. Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth. Reprint, Atlanta, 1986. Originally published in Edinburgh in 1905, this was an early attempt to recount the "origin, progress, and aim of the science of Comparative Religion." The section on the field's "prophets and pioneers" offers a brief account of the significance of Hannah Adams and her work (pp. 146–150).

King, Ursula. "A Question of Identity: Women Scholars and the Study of Religion." In Religion and Gender, edited by Ursula King, pp. 219–244. Oxford, 1995. An analysis of the place of women scholars in the history of the study of religion, King's chapter also notes Adams's significance for the field (pp. 222, 224).

Tweed, Thomas A. "An American Pioneer in the Study of Religion: Hannah Adams (1755–1831) and her Dictionary of All Religions." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40 (1992): 437–464. This article offers an overview of the life and work of Hannah Adams as a scholar of religion.

Vella, Michael W. "Theology, Genre, and Gender: The Precarious Place of Hannah Adams in American Literary History." Early American Literature 28 (1993): 21–41. Vella's article assesses Adams's place in American literary history.

Thomas A. Tweed (2005)