Abstract
This article investigates the extent to which the theology and structure of marriage within the German Moravian Church functioned to connect and grow the Church as an international network across the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. Specifically, it argues that Moravian conceptions of marriage facilitated intentional international partnerships that led to the relocation and migration of many European women as Moravian missionaries throughout the eighteenth century. In some instances, early Moravians lived in sex-segregated communal housing and viewed sexual intercourse as a sacred unification with Christ, free of human desire. Part of the Moravian impetus to be “everywhere at home” required preventing individual congregational differences in order to create a larger international community. If the Church aimed to view all brothers and sisters as productive bodies to serve the growth of the community, then these bodies needed to be interchangeable and unrooted to a specific space. The premeditated practice of intermarriage between congregations meant that there were not individual groups that practiced the Moravian faith, but rather a singular global church family. Based on an analysis of Moravian missionary women's memoirs, this article begins to delve into the social and geographic mobility available to these eighteenth-century women through a nonnormative marital structure.
Highlights
In 1767, Bishop Benjamin Latrobe, leader of the Fulneck congregation in Yorkshire, England, created a list of women he thought suitable for “translocation” from Yorkshire to various Moravian settlements across Germany, North America, and the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core
This article investigates the extent to which the theology and structure of marriage within the German Moravian Church functioned to connect and grow the Church as an international network across the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. It argues that Moravian conceptions of marriage facilitated intentional international partnerships that led to the relocation and migration of many European women as Moravian missionaries throughout the eighteenth century
Wilson’s international marriage rather late in life, as well as her apparent lack of children, provide entry to discuss the purpose of marriage within the Moravian Church mission system
Summary
In 1767, Bishop Benjamin Latrobe, leader of the Fulneck congregation in Yorkshire, England, created a list of women he thought suitable for “translocation” from Yorkshire to various Moravian settlements across Germany, North America, and the. As they moved through the eighteenth-century world, the Moravians took with them their peculiar communal organization divided by gender, age, and marital status While they often traveled in small missionary bands, the Moravians established several settled, closed congregations known as Ortsgemeine in Germany, England, and the North American British colonies, most notably in Bethlehem, Herrnhut, and Herrnhaag in Hesse, near Frankfurt. Men and women sat divided by sex during worship services, and the church leaders aimed to limit contact between them outside of worship In her analysis of the Moravian congregation in Bristol, England, Madge Dresser noted that according to the ruling of the Elders Conference in 1774, “it was a ‘Bad and offensive affair’ for young people to be seen walking out in each other’s company.” Historian Paul Peucker has discovered in some documents and blueprints of Moravian communities that, at least in the communities at Bethlehem and Herrnhut, Zinzendorf’s marital theology required sexual relations to take place within a designated room in the meeting house.. The Moravian Church ceased to operate in the true choir system in the beginning of the nineteenth century, when they moved to become less controversial and eliminated the more radical and mystical elements of their theology
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