Maria Stewart’s work is shot through with biblical nuances and references that only someone with strong biblical knowledge and expertise within the field of African American religious history can tackle. Given Prof. Cooper’s expertise in both areas, she has the ability to synthesize and interpret the work of Maria Stewart in a way no other scholar has done yet. She provides a fresh and original look at the work of Maria Stewart.

With this book Valerie Cooper joins a growing number of scholars who have found significant historical riches in studying the religious lives of ordinary African Americans. Her careful editing of an important 1831 essay from the little-known Maria W. Stewart, along with her own careful historical investigation of Stewart and sensitive interaction with up-to-date scholarship on African American engagement with the Bible, make this an unusually well-rounded effort. The book illuminates both the historical world of Maria Stewart and the latest debates on the religious lives of black Americans. This is a fine book.

Cooper (Univ. of Virginia) examines Maria Stewart as an evangelical preacher and theologian whose intricate life and brief career as a public lecturer can only be fully understood by attending to the biblical imaginary.... Cooper ably situates Stewart amid other African American evangelical women like Jarena Lee and Sojourner Truth to produce a very useful and attentive study of an important figure in 19th-century religious history.