Historiographical Record: Freemasonry, Ritual, and Gender in Revolutionary Rhode Island (1749–1803) (FEDPA)

This curatorial record documents a doctoral dissertation that reexamines Freemasonry in eighteenth-century Rhode Island, challenging its conventional interpretation as an expression of Enlightenment sociability and proto-democratic culture. Through a close study of lodges in Newport and Providence (1749–1803), the work argues that Freemasonry functioned as a deeply religious, ritualized, and affective institution, rooted in myth, symbolic kingship, and structured social cohesion. Rather than operating as a vehicle of revolutionary ideology, the lodges are shown to have maintained affinities with Anglican structures and to have been shaped by Jacobite and royalist imaginaries. Their membership, composed largely of mobile and socially unanchored men, found in Masonic practice a stabilizing framework of belonging, hierarchy, and symbolic order. The dissertation further contends that, in the post-independence period, Masonic rhetoric contributed to the sacralization of emergent American institutions, displacing monarchical authority into new symbolic forms. The record preserves this historiographical intervention as a descriptive object without endorsing its interpretations or implying institutional continuity.