Pietist movements challenged traditional forms of religious community, group formation, and ecclesiology. Where many older accounts have emphasized the individual and subjective nature of Pietists to the exclusion of community, one of the hallmarks of Pietism has been the creation of groups and experimentation with new forms of religious association and sociality. The essays presented here reflect the diverse ways in which Pietists struggled with the tension between the separation from the “world” and the formation of new communities from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century in Europe and North America. Presenting a range of methodological perspectives, the authors explore the processes of community formation, the function of communicative networks, and the diversity of Pietist communities within the context of early modern religious and cultural history. Religious History and Culture Series – Volume 4 Subseries Editors: Joris van Eijnatten & Fred van Lieburg

This collection explores different approaches to contextualizing and conceptualizing the history of Pietism, particularly German-speaking Pietistic groups who migrated to the British colonies in North America during the long eighteenth century. Emerging in the seventeenth century, Pietism was closely related to Puritanism, sharing similar evangelical and heterogeneous characteristics. The importance of Pietism in shaping Protestant society and culture in Europe and North America has long been recognized, but as a topic of scholarly inquiry, it has until now received little interdisciplinary attention. Offering essays by leading scholars from a range of fields this volume provides the first overview of the subject, helping to situate Pietism in the broader Atlantic context, and making an important contribution to understanding religious life in Europe and colonial North America during the eighteenth century.

The historical movement known as Pietism emphasized the response of faith and inward transformation as crucial aspects of conversion to Christ. Unfortunately, Pietism today is often equated with a holier-than-thou spiritual attitude, religious legalism, or withdrawal from involvement in society. In this book Roger Olson and Christian Collins Winn argue that classical, historical Pietism is an influential stream in evangelical Christianity and that it must be recovered as a resource for evangelical renewal. They challenge misconceptions of Pietism by describing the origins, development, and main themes of the historical movement and the spiritual-theological ethos stemming from it. The book also explores Pietism s influence on contemporary Christian theologians and spiritual leaders such as Richard Foster and Stanley Grenz. Watch a 2015 interview with the authors of this book here:

August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members’ relationship to the pious stories of the “last hours,” the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them. A learned, insightful work by one of the world’s leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.

A Companion to German Pietism offers an introduction to recent Pietism scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic, in German, Dutch, and English. The focus is upon early modern German Pietism, a movement that arose in the late 17th century German Empire within both Reformed and Lutheran traditions. It introduced a new paradigm to German Protestantism that included personal renewal, new birth, women-dominated conventicles, and millennialism. The “Introduction” offers a concise overview of modern research into German Pietism. The Companion is then organized according to the different worlds of Pietist existence—intellectual, devotional, literary-cultural, and social-political.

Despite shifting trends in the study of Oceanic Atlantic history, the colonial Atlantic world as it is described by historians today continues to be a largely English-only space; even when other language communities are examined, they, too, are considered to be monolingual and discrete. Babel of the Atlantic pushes back against this monolingual fallacy by documenting multilingualism, translation, and fluid movement across linguistic borders. Focusing on Philadelphia and surrounding areas that include Germantown, Bethlehem, and the so-called Indian country to the west, this volume demonstrates the importance of viewing inhabitants not as members of isolated language communities, whether English, German, Lenape, Mohican, or others, but as creators of a vibrant zone of mixed languages and shifting politics. Organized around four themes—religion, education, race and abolitionism, and material culture and architecture—and drawing from archives such as almanacs, newspapers, and the material world, the chapters in this volume show how polyglot, tolerant, and multilingual spaces encouraged diverse peoples to coexist. Contributors examine subjects such as the multicultural Moravian communities in colonial Pennsylvania, the Charity School movement of the 1750s, and the activities of Quaker abolitionists, showing how educational and religious movements addressed and embraced cultural and linguistic variety. Drawing early American scholarship beyond the normative narrative of monolingualism, this volume will be invaluable to historians and sociolinguists whose work focuses on Pennsylvania and colonial, revolutionary, and antebellum America. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Craig Atwood, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Katherine Faull, Wolfgang Flügel, Katharine Gerbner, Maruice Jackson, Lisa Minardi, Jürgen Overhoff, and Birte Pfleger.

This book explores the life and spirituality of John Cennick (1718–1755) and argues for a new appreciation of the contradictions and complexities in early evangelicalism. It explores Cennick’s evangelistic work in Ireland, his relationship with Count Zinzendorf and the creative tension between the Moravian and Methodist elements of his participation in the eighteenth-century revivals. The chapters draw on extensive unpublished correspondence between Cennick and Zinzendorf, as well as Cennick’s unique diary of his first stay in the continental Moravian centres of Marienborn, Herrnhaag and Lindheim. A maverick personality, John Cennick is seen at the centre of some of the principal controversies of the time. The trajectory of his emergence as a prominent figure in the revivals is remarkable in its intensity and hybridity and brings into focus a number of themes in the landscape of early evangelicalism: the eclectic nature of its inspirations, the religious enthusiasm nurtured in Anglican societies, the expansion of the pool of preaching talent, the social tensions unleashed by religious innovations, and the particular nature of the Moravian contribution during the 1740s and 1750s. Offering a major re-evaluation of Cennick’s spirituality, the book will be of interest to scholars of evangelical and church history.