The Moravians of colonial Pennsylvania are enjoying renewed attention today from scholars with diverse interests. The Moravians’ rapid rise, communal institutions, controversial devotional and sexual practices, and sudden financial crisis during the mid-eighteenth century have been explored in important recent studies by Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Katherine Carté Engel, and Paul Peucker, among others.1 Now Sarah Justina Eyerly offers a sweeping new interpretation of their rich music culture and distinctive sound environments in Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania.
Founded by Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf of Saxony (1700–1760), the Moravians, or Herrnhut Community of Brothers (Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine), brought together a group of Hussite exiles from Bohemia with followers of the count’s own vision of Lutheran Pietism. In 1722, Zinzendorf welcomed the remnant of the Unity of the Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), Jan Hus’s fifteenth-century religious reform movement, to Herrnhut, a town on his...
University of California Press