Overview

In early Pennsylvania, translation served as a utopian tool creating harmony across linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences. Patrick Erben challenges the long-standing historical myth--first promulgated by Benjamin Franklin--that language diversity posed a threat to communal coherence. He deftly traces the pansophist and Neoplatonist philosophies of European reformers that informed the radical English and German Protestants who founded the holy experiment. Their belief in hidden yet persistent links between human language and the word of God impelled their vision of a common spiritual idiom. Translation became the search for underlying correspondences between diverse human expressions of the divine and served as a model for reconciliation and inclusiveness. Drawing on German and English archival sources, Erben examines iconic translations that engendered community in colonial Pennsylvania, including William Penn's translingual promotional literature, Francis Daniel Pastorius's multilingual poetics, Ephrata's angelic singing and transcendent calligraphy, the Moravians' polyglot missions, and the common language of suffering for peace among Quakers, Pietists, and Mennonites. By revealing a mystical quest for unity, Erben presents a compelling counternarrative to monolingualism and Enlightenment empiricism in eighteenth-century America.

Full Product Details

9781469601342

Table of Contents

Reviews

Erben's discerning and fascinating examination of the foundational vision of Pennsylvania traces the origins of the 'Holy Experiment' to early modern utopian concepts, advanced by John Amos Comenius and Jacob Bohme, that sought to overcome Babylonic language confusion through translation. In Pennsylvania, German Pietists and English Quakers alike applied these concepts to forge one community of believers. A crucial contribution. --Claudia Schnurmann, Universitat Hamburg With remarkable skill and formidable learning, Erben integrates the histories of radical religious sectarians, both English and German, in early Pennsylvania. His elegant readings cross a wide range of sources, from mystical texts to musical scores, to restore our understanding of the utopian culture shared by the linguistically diverse believers drawn to William Penn's 'Holy Experiment.' --Mark Peterson, University of California, Berkeley In this masterful study, Erben recovers the world of those German Pietists and English Quakers who sought to transcend the chaos of a post-Babel world and craft a linguistically pure New World utopia. Along the way, he forces us to rethink the relationship between language, religion, and community in early America. A virtuoso performance. --John Smolenski, University of California, Davis A Harmony of the Spirits permits us access to a utopian Pennsylvania where potent souls could commune directly with the hearts of others, regardless of language, culture, gender, or age. Exploring this Neoplatonic aspiration for understanding enacted through translation makes the early Pennsylvania Pietists seem the opposite of the sectarians history deems them to have been. Erben refreshes our sense of the radical ways in which various German believers received William Penn's promise that philia would be the ground of a new community in America. --David S. Shields, University of South Carolina

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available