This English translation of the 1786 work, originally published in 1889, is a history of the community of Seventh Day Baptists at Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and is one of the major primary resources on Ephrata. Written by two orignal members of the community, it includes a biography of the spiritual order's founder Conrad Beissel, whose spiritual name in the Ephrata Cloister community was Friedsam Gottrecht.
The first book in English to provide an in-depth introduction to the Christian theosophic tradition that began with Jacob Bo¬hme, Wisdom's Children brings us into a startling new world of experiential spirituality that is in fact the Christian equivalent of Sufism and Kabbalism. With biographic introductions to major theosophers and detailed discussions of theosophic authors such as John Pordage, Jane Leade, Dionysius Freher, and Johann Gichtel—as well as a survey of their major theosophic cosmological and metaphysical teachings—this book is an indispensable guide to the hidden history of Protestantism and its ramifications today. With chapters discussing theosophy in relation to Gnosticism, magic, astrology, alchemy, and other Western esoteric traditions, Wisdom's Children is situated solidly in its historical context using primary works from the tradition itself. The book also provides unexpected insights into how this modern gnostic tradition speaks to us today, and suggests how this tradition could spark a "new Renaissance" to link spirituality, the arts, and the sciences in a new and encompassing vision.
The first scholarly history of the iconic Anabaptist text. Approximately 2,500 Anabaptists were martyred in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe. Their surviving brethren compiled stories of those who suffered and died for the faith into martyr books. The most historically and culturally significant of these, The Bloody Theater—more commonly known as Martyrs Mirror—was assembled by the Dutch Mennonite minister Thieleman van Braght and published in 1660. Today, next to the Bible, it is the single most important text to Anabaptists—Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites. In some Anabaptist communities, it is passed to new generations as a wedding or graduation gift. David L. Weaver-Zercher combines the fascinating history of Martyrs Mirror with a detailed analysis of Anabaptist life, religion, and martyrdom. He traces the publication, use, and dissemination of this key martyrology across nearly four centuries and explains why it holds sacred status in contemporary Amish and Mennonite households. Even today, the words and deeds of these martyred Christians are referenced in sermons, Sunday school lessons, and history books. Weaver-Zercher argues that Martyrs Mirror was designed to teach believers how to live a proper Christian life. In van Braght’s view, accounts of the martyrs helped to remind readers of the things that mattered, thus inspiring them to greater faithfulness. Martyrs Mirror remains a tool of revival, offering new life to the communities and people who read it by revitalizing Anabaptist ideals and values. Meticulously researched and illustrated with sketches from early publications of Martyrs Mirror, Weaver-Zercher’s ambitious history weaves together the existing scholarship on this iconic text in an accessible and engaging way.
In Citizens in a Strange Land, Hermann Wellenreuther examines the broadsides—printed single sheets—produced by the Pennsylvania German community. These broadsides covered topics ranging from local controversies and politics to devotional poems and hymns. Each one is a product of and reaction to a particular historical setting. To understand them fully, Wellenreuther systematically reconstructs Pennsylvania’s print culture, the material conditions of life, the problems German settlers faced, the demands their communities made on the individual settlers, the complications to be overcome, and the needs to be satisfied. He shows how these broadsides provided advice, projections, and comment on phases of life from cradle to grave.
In early Pennsylvania, translation served as a utopian tool creating harmony across linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences. Patrick Erben challenges the long-standing historical myth--first promulgated by Benjamin Franklin--that language diversity posed a threat to communal coherence. He deftly traces the pansophist and Neoplatonist philosophies of European reformers that informed the radical English and German Protestants who founded the "holy experiment." Their belief in hidden yet persistent links between human language and the word of God impelled their vision of a common spiritual idiom. Translation became the search for underlying correspondences between diverse human expressions of the divine and served as a model for reconciliation and inclusiveness. Drawing on German and English archival sources, Erben examines iconic translations that engendered community in colonial Pennsylvania, including William Penn's translingual promotional literature, Francis Daniel Pastorius's multilingual poetics, Ephrata's "angelic" singing and transcendent calligraphy, the Moravians' polyglot missions, and the common language of suffering for peace among Quakers, Pietists, and Mennonites. By revealing a mystical quest for unity, Erben presents a compelling counternarrative to monolingualism and Enlightenment empiricism in eighteenth-century America.
