Self, Community, World: Moravian Education in a Transatlantic World

This book traces Moravian communal and educational practices and the techniques of the self. The focus of the volume is not a nation-state but a community that was cosmopolitan by the very standards of the eighteenth-century world. By the early 1740s, the Moravians had solidly established themselves as an Atlantic community under the leadership of a German count, Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760). The cosmopolitan nature of their community, paralleled only in the aristocratic culture and the rapidly expanding network of Masonic lodges, became a natural, self-evident experience of the Moravians. Germany, Holland, England, the Baltic, Scandinavia, the Caribbean, the North American colonies, and, Africa became the domains of Moravian experience. What made possible this global experience? This book answers the question by exploring Moravian culture at three different but closely intertwined levels: the place of the Moravians in the Atlantic world, its distinctive communal organization, and the individual development of its members. Heikki Lempa is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Moravian College. Paul Peucker is archivist at the "Moravian Archives" in Bethlehem.