TACOMA, Wash. – Professor David Lupher describes the 1620s New England settlement of Merry Mount as a “fascinating community that found itself in uncomfortable and annoying proximity” to the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.
The rebellious fur trading post is best known as the site of a maypole festival that allegedly gave rein to “the beasly practieses of the madd Bacchinalians,” as the furious Governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, put it. The Merry Mount incident and its classical dimensions will be the focus of the 38th John D. Regester Lectureship to be given by David Lupher, professor of classics at University of Puget Sound. His talk, “Pagans and Pilgrims: ‘Beastly Practices of Mad Bacchanalians’ in Early New England,” will start at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 18, in Kilworth Memorial Chapel on campus. Admission is free and the public is welcome.
Merry Mount, or Ma-re Mount as it was originally known, came about when a slippery lawyer by the name of Thomas Morton led a revolt of the indentured servants who made up the bulk of the English settlement then known as Mt. Wollaston. On May Day in 1627, Morton wrote, it was decided to celebrate the coming of spring with “Revels and merriment” that included dancing around the pole with “lasses in beaver coats” (that is, Native American women), in the good English tradition. The Pilgrims and Puritans were scandalized. Governor Bradford denounced the revelers as Bacchanalians (ancient worshipers of Bacchus), and the rival colony was squelched.
Lupher, a researcher and author in the field of the “classical tradition,” will talk about the Merry Mount incident in the context of the “saints” (the Pilgrims and Puritans) and the “strangers” (settlers who were not part of the congregations), all within the larger context of Europeans and Native Americans. In line with his work, Lupher will focus on the classical Greco-Roman dimensions of the event. These classical echoes, he says, are bound up with controversial issues of the day, such as firearms and whiskey trafficking, interracial sexual relations, and a “faint whiff of Pilgrim homophobia.”
Lupher also will explore some of the related literature that subsequently arose, including writings by Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Lothrop Motley, and Howard Hanson’s opera Merry Mount, first produced at the Metropolitan Opera in 1934.
Professor David Lupher is the author of Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and co-author of the upcoming The Wars of the Romans (Oxford University Press, December 2010), the first critical edition and translation of a treatise on the justice of the Roman conquests written by Alberico Gentili, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford during the reign of Elizabeth I. An article on Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, exploring the Confederate classicist’s views on race, slavery, and abolition, and co-written with Elizabeth Vandiver of Whitman College, will be included in a volume to be published soon by Oxford University Press. Lupher, a graduate of Yale and Stanford universities, teaches classical languages, ancient literature in translation, Greco-Roman religions, and the classical tradition at Puget Sound.
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