The Angelic Brethren and Everyday Sacredness: A Protestant Theologian's Journey from Berlin to Leiden in 1717*

Abstract

In the summer of 1717, a private teacher named Jacob Michelmann travelled from Berlin to Leiden to meet the head of a Protestant community known as the Angelic Brethren. During a pivotal time in European religious and intellectual history, Johann Wilhelm Überfeld sought to inculcate in his followers, including Michelmann, a powerful sense of everyday sacredness. Überfeld criticised what he perceived as the markedness of religious speech and acts compared to unmarked everyday activities. Implicitly, this state of affairs rendered the bulk of daily life profane, that is, largely detached and irrelevant to religious life and spiritual progress. For Überfeld and his followers, however, the divine spirit could communicate even through seemingly mundane trivialities, if believers had eyes to see and ears to hear. Accordingly, they paid great attention to household chores and domestic spaces. During his journey, Michelmann successfully acquired this mindset. Yet several years later he started neglecting the lessons of his journey, which caused conflict with Überfeld. Based on the visitor's own travelogue and a wealth of other sources, this article describes Michelmann's journey from its inception to its aftermath while probing Überfeld's notion of everyday sacredness.