Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola. By Cécile Fromont. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. xvii + 245 pp.

and “King” celebrations in nineteenth-century New Orleans and elsewhere to argue that connections between such celebrations and similar activities in Latin America and the Caribbean illustrate not “pan-African communalities” (172) but “Afro-Iberian roots” (174). Extending this line of thought, Dewulf sees the affinity of some “charter generation” blacks for Dutch Reformed or Anglican churches as being rooted in perceived similarities between Catholicism and these Protestant faiths, the material benefits of joining, and the possibilities that joining could lead to freedom. From there, Dewulf’s narrative ties into conventional understandings of early Black Christianity in colonial America to raise the issue of “whether the presence of Afro-Atlantic Catholics . . . may, in any form, have influenced the development of Black Protestantism” (183). He argues that it did, making connections between Pinkster ceremonies as Pentecost celebrations and Pentecost celebrations elsewhere in the black Atlantic, the possible Kongolese origins of the “ring shouts” used in rituals of black mutual aid societies as late as the nineteenth century, and other parallels between Afro-Catholic brotherhoods, black American mutual-aid societies, and black evangelical churches, with special attention given to the South Carolina low country. Engaging with and expanding upon recent scholarship in Atlantic history and American religious history, Dewulf has provided a thoughtful examination of the history of black Catholicism and its shaping of life for African peoples and for the charter generation of enslaved Africans in the Americas. His bold and intriguing arguments for connections between Afro-Atlantic Catholics and black Christianity in the United States should be a starting point for further research and historiographical debate.