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.ÿþ16.Rites of Passagevirginia s Anglican faith defined, demarcated, and mediated the personal ritesof passage birth, initiation, marriage, and death for the great majority ofits white population and to lesser and varying extents for non-adherents andAfrican Americans as well.So customary were these rituals and thus rarelyreflected upon at the time that their significance easily escapes notice, buttogether with weekly worship they were basic ingredients of Virginia societyand culture.Rites of passage, Daniel Beaver suggests,   evoked social relation-ships to assist the subject or primary beneficiary of the ritual to cross a per-ceived boundary or threshold in the process of transition to a new status ornew social position and also represented the meaning of this transition sym-bolically.The rites of passage were particularly sensitive points in religiousculture, an intersection of diverse forms of personal relationship and symbolicnotions of personal and shared identity.  1BaptismBaptism followed birth.The Prayer Book instructed parents to bring infants totheir parish church for baptism as soon as feasible after birth.Ministers   shalloften admonish the people, that they defer not the Baptism of their childrenlonger than the first or second Sunday next after their birth, or other holy-day falling betweene unless upon a great and reasonable cause.  2 Virginiansresponded faithfully to the spirit if not the letter of the rubric in having theirinfants baptized.Entries in the register for Bristol Parish (Prince George), forexample, are reasonably complete for the early 1720s and early 1730s.3 Between1720 and 1724, George Robertson baptized 352 persons, almost all infants or211 [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]