The letter and the spirit: calligraphy, manuscripts, and popular piety in German Pennsylvania, ca. 1750-1850
Date
2018
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The early German-speaking inhabitants of southeastern Pennsylvania cultivated calligraphic and manuscript arts as part of their popular piety and devotional practice. The documents they produced have long captured the attention of scholars and collectors, and they exude the Pietistic spiritual fervor of a bygone age. Yet, despite their colorful religious contents and fascinating connections to everyday spiritual experience, few historians of American religion have paid much attention to the artifacts. Moreover, the artworks’ makers and users remain largely absent from sweeping narratives of early America’s spiritual legacy. This dissertation seeks to situate the documents, their makers, and their users in the context of early American religious and intellectual history, highlighting the texts’ value as source material for understanding the literary diversity of early American life. It applies theories and methods derived from the fields of religious history, intellectual history, book history, material culture, sociology, and print/manuscript culture studies to a set of text-based primary sources that have by and large been treated as decorative folk art by local-historical scholars. The dissertation proposes a new approach to the study of Pennsylvania German manuscript culture that more closely aligns the field to the analytical priorities of religious scholars and book historians. It situates the Pennsylvania tradition in a comparative context and proposes new directions for early-American book history and studies of manuscript culture, while enhancing understandings of the long, transatlantic history of Protestantism.
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Keywords
Calligraphy, Frakturschrift, Manuscripts, Pennsylvania, Pietism, Protestantism