“All My Books Printed and Wrote”: Handley Chipman’s Religious Texts and Networks in Revolutionary-Era Nova Scotia

Handley Chipman (1717-1799), a New England Planter in eighteenth-century Nova Scotia, created and circulated manuscript texts at a revolutionary moment in reading, religion, and politics. Variously a cabinetmaker, distiller, and justice of the peace, Chipman used print and manuscript texts to transplant Congregationalism to the “frontier” setting of Nova Scotia, a project complicated by New Light revivals and the American Revolution.  He created manuscript books by copying scripture and Puritan commentary, adding his own meditative prayers, and carefully inventoried a community library. Although Chipman’s textual practices seem traditional and rooted in orthodox Puritanism, he also copied and then circulated the unpublished journal of New Light evangelist, Henry Alline (1748-1784), also a New England Planter in Nova Scotia. Alline, a self-described “anti-traditionalist,” was the center of an extensive itinerancy and textual network that ranged throughout backcountry New England and the Maritime provinces. Chipman thus stands at a remarkable juncture of religious networks: on the one hand, ties with New England Congregationalism stretched taut by migration and Revolution; on the other, a New Light evangelicalism with strong appeal in newly settled communities.

In her comparative study of backcountry New England and Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Mancke argues that the revivals Alline engendered exposed deep-seated divisions within Puritan Congregationalism—tensions only evident when transplanted into Nova Scotia’s different polity and more flexible religious establishment. This paper explores how Handley Chipman, a Congregational transplant, embodied that tension as manifested within his reading habits and manuscript practices. Chipman attempted to interleave, as it were, orthodox and orderly Calvinism with New Light evangelicalism. Reading practices and manuscript circulation that at first appear “traditional” thus helped Chipman negotiate complex religious changes and to make adjustments in shifting religious networks.