Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple’s Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World by Aaron Spencer Fogleman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple’s Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World by Aaron Spencer Fogleman Constance Post (bio) Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple’s Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World aaron spencer fogleman Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013 336 pp. In Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple’s Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World, Aaron Spencer Fogleman chronicles the lives of Jean-François Reynier, a French Huguenot born in 1715 in the Alpine village of Vevey on Lake Geneva, and Maria Barbara Knoll, about whom little is known prior to her marriage except that she spent her early years in one of the German territories and was likely a Lutheran. The circumstances under which Reynier and Knoll met and married in 1740 at Marienborn, the Moravian community in Wetteravia near Frankfurt am Main, situate Fogleman’s narrative in the context of a movement for which the visit of a small band of adherents from northern Moravia to Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf in Lower Saxony in the early eighteenth century proved decisive. The group settled nearby and soon sought to extend its reach beyond Europe. As part of the Moravian Church’s proselytizing effort in the Atlantic world, the Reyniers played a vital role in its work in various communities—new and not so new—on St. Thomas and in Pennsylvania, Suriname, and Georgia; among various Atlantic peoples, including indigenes, enslaved Africans, and European settlers from many countries; and between various Protestant groups as well as rival Moravian factions. The riveting story that emerges is a complex transatlantic narrative about two persons who occupied multiple subject positions that sometimes collided. Fogleman notes that, as Europeans, they were often viewed as representatives of Western imperialism by non-Europeans with whom they came in contact; as immigrants, they encountered many of the same difficulties in the Americas as those for whom the impetus to leave Europe had a different religious motivation or none at all; as Moravians, they faced discrimination from other Protestant groups as well as internal strife within their own group for which they were sometimes the precipitating cause; and as husband and wife, they embraced the ideal of companionate marriage but found it impossible to rise to every challenge that it posed. [End Page 263] Organized in four parts with twenty-nine illustrations, eight maps, and two tables, Fogleman’s account begins with the early life of Jean-François Reynier in Vevey and quickly shifts to Pennsylvania, where Reynier, unable to satisfy the terms of the “redemptioner system,” was sold on the auction block in Philadelphia into seven years of indentured servitude. He later joined the Moravian celibate community at Ephrata, where his quest for spiritual perfection eventually led him to build a hut and live on acorns. Following his recovery from a bout of madness, he traveled with a Separatist minister throughout Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey before heading south, where he hoped to meet with Zinzendorf. Reynier made the journey of seven hundred miles to Georgia on foot, arriving at the Moravian community in Savannah on September 15, 1735. There Reynier performed the “miracle of the crocodile,” possibly a treatment that combined spiritual and medical knowledge that he learned from the Yuchis. Reynier also sought to convert the slave population in the nearby Moravian community of Purrysburg, South Carolina, but slave owners opposed it for fear of a slave uprising. Of Reynier’s initial crossing of the Atlantic, Fogleman remarks that “[l]ike so many other migrants, something wrong at home was driving him away, and something at his destination attracted him” (28–29). What drove him away appears to have been his family and the prospect of military service. What stayed with him for the rest of his life as the “ambitious, yet disaffected and troubled soul” he had become, notes Fogleman, was the habit of “seeking self-perfection and criticizing those around him” (29). The habit is also what drove him back to Europe in 1739, a reverse transatlantic crossing that few immigrants chose to make. As Fogleman points out, Jean-François was already enmeshed in a web of relationships in the...