Chapter One: The Rise of Trou Coffy and the Jacmel Insurgent Theater -- Chapter Two: Romaine-la-Prophetesse -- Chapter Three: Abbe Ouviere -- Chapter Four: Trou Coffy and the Leogane Insurgent Theater -- Chapter Five: Sacerdotal Subversion in Saint-Domingue -- Chapter Six: The Priest, the Prophetess, and the Fall of Trou Coffy -- Chapter Seven: An Abbot's Atlantic Adventures -- Chapter Eight: Dr. Pascalis and the Making of American Medicine -- Chapter Nine: The Prophetess in Fantasy and Imagination.
Summary:
"Romaine-la-Prophetesse led a devastating insurgency during the first year of the Haitian Revolution. His advisor was a white French Catholic priest, Abbe Ouviere. This book answers who the priest and the prophetess were, what they achieved, and what their lives tell us about the revolutionary Atlantic world"-- Provided by publisher. "By 1791, the French Revolution had spread to Haiti, where slaves and free Blacks alike had begun demanding civil rights guaranteed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Enter Romaine-la-Prophetesse, a free Black Dominican coffee farmer who dressed in women's clothes and claimed that the Virgin Mary was his godmother. Inspired by mystical revelations from the Holy Mother, he amassed a large and volatile following of insurgents who would go on to sack countless plantations and conquer the coastal cities of Jacmel and Leogane. For this brief period, Romaine counted as his political adviser the white French Catholic priest and physician Abbe Ouiviere, a renaissance man of cunning politics who would go on to become a pioneering figure in early American science and medicine. Brought together by Catholicism and the turmoil of the revolutionary Atlantic, the priest and the prophetess come to symbolize the enlightenment ideals of freedom and a more just social order in the 18th century Caribbean. This crucial book, based on extensive archival research, offers a major contribution to our understanding of Catholic mysticism and West African religious practices at the time of the Haitian Revolution and reveals the significant ways in which religion and race intersected in the turbulences and triumphs of revolutionary France, Haiti, and early republican America"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.