A comprehensive overview of the writings of Francis Daniel Pastorius, founder of Germantown, lawyer, educator, and early modern polymath. Includes many of Pastorius's unpublished manuscripts as well as new translations of German-language tracts printed in his lifetime.

Francis Daniel Pastorius was one of the first German settlers to Pennsylvania and a touchstone figure of German-American cultural heritage. This monumental anthology presents a selection of his many writings in one volume. Pastorius sailed to North America as a Pietist but found a unique home among the Quakers in Pennsylvania. Within this early modern religious context, he was a lawyer, educator, and community leader; a polymath; and a prolific writer and collector of knowledge. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Pastorius held one of the largest manuscript collections in North America and wrote voluminously in multiple languages. His collecting, curation, and dissemination represents a unique look at the ways information was stored, processed, and utilized during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in both North America and Europe. This rich selection of Pastorius’s writings on religion, education, gardening, law and community, and the colony of Pennsylvania—as well as letters, poems, and numerous encyclopedic and bibliographic works—shows the mind of a true humanist in action. Pastorius’s works have long been important to the archival study of early German settlement and the Atlantic world. Now available together, transcribed, translated, and annotated, his writings will have widespread significance to the study of early American literature and history.

Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania

The author of The Footnote reflects on scribes, scholars, and the work of publishing during the golden age of the book. From Francis Bacon to Barack Obama, thinkers and political leaders have denounced humanists as obsessively bookish and allergic to labor. In this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, renowned historian Anthony Grafton invites us to see the scholars of early modern Europe as diligent workers. Meticulously illuminating the physical and mental labors that fostered the golden age of the book—the compiling of notebooks, copying and correction of texts and proofs, preparation of copy—he shows us how the exertions of scholars shaped influential books, treatises, and forgeries. Inky Fingers ranges widely, tracing the transformation of humanistic approaches to texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and examining the simultaneously sustaining and constraining effects of theological polemics on sixteenth-century scholars. Grafton draws new connections between humanistic traditions and intellectual innovations, textual learning and craft knowledge, manuscript and print. Above all, Grafton makes clear that the nitty-gritty of bookmaking has had a profound impact on the history of ideas—that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands.

Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.

This book examines apian imagery—bees, drones, honey, and the hive—in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary and oral traditions. In England and the New World colonies during a critical period of expansion, the metaphor of this communal society faced unprecedented challenges even as it came to emblematize the process of colonization itself. The beehive connected the labor of those marginalized by race, class, gender, or species to larger considerations of sovereignty. This study examines the works of William Shakespeare; Francis Daniel Pastorius; Hopi, Wyandotte, and Pocasset cultures; John Milton; Hester Pulter; and Bernard Mandeville. Its contribution lies in its exploration of the simultaneously recuperative and destructive narratives that place the bee at the nexus of the human, the animal, and the environment. The book argues that bees play a central representational and physical role in shaping conflicts over hierarchies of the early transatlantic world.