Reviewed by Sarah Apetrei | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3

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Reviewed by Sarah Apetrei | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Jesus Is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America. By Aaron Spencer Fogleman. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 340 pages. $49.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Sarah Apetrei, Keble College, University of Oxford
With a headline-grabbing title like Jesus Is Female, Aaron Spencer Fogleman's account of Moravians and radical religion in early America might legitimately be expected to contribute importantly to the growing body of literature on gender in heterodox religion in the early modern world.¹ Though advances in this field of research over recent years have been impressive and it is now possible to navigate with much greater confidence through the complex junctions between mystical thought, prophecy, subversive ideas about the divine gender, and defenses of female leadership in religious radicalism, there remain several lacunae. While Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic have been extremely well served by gender historians, for example, we are still waiting for a comprehensive study of gender in the Radical Reformation and also for serious monographs on this theme in Methodist and Moravian thought.	1
Certainly, Fogleman has gathered some fascinating material on the sexual practices and deviant constructions of gender that got the American Moravians into trouble with their Protestant contemporaries. He describes in vivid detail the liturgical significance attached to sexual intercourse in marriage and the rituals surrounding the initial consummation; the authority given to women preachers; the use of female imagery for Christ and the Holy Spirit; and, most striking of all, the strange eroticism that characterized Moravian devotions to the "side wound" (80) and blood of Christ. In a few critical pages, Fogleman analyzes the Moravian iconography of the side wound as vaginal opening; both the images and the short ecstatic expressions associated with them are truly startling: "Deep inside! Deep inside! Deep inside the little side!" [Tief nein! Tief nein! Tief nein ins Seitlein!] (80), exclaims one Moravian mystic at the height of spiritual rapture. Another finds himself "Trembling in the Side Wound" [Aufs Seiten Höhlgen Zitterlich] (80). Yet oddly we find little to sustain the suggestion that Moravians worshipped a female Christ or indeed a "female Trinity" (103), the phrase used repeatedly by the author. Fogleman cites some evidence that two of the persons of the Trinity fulfilled certain maternal or spousal roles at a symbolic level, but in this the Moravians did not even go as far as Behmenists had done in the seventeenth century.²	2
The problem is that Fogleman's title is doubly disingenuous: in the first place, it does not refer to a consistent tradition in Moravian theology (at least none that can be recovered from the evidence presented here), and secondly, it places a heavy emphasis on gender that the scope of Fogleman's discussion cannot support. This simply is not a book about gender in the religious thought of the American Moravians, and readers will be disappointed if they hope to find these themes expounded in a full and satisfying way. We are given precious little background to the most radical of Moravian positions on the feminine character of Christ's work, or to their theological defenses for using women preachers, or even to the spirituality of the side wound. Inexplicably, phenomena such as the "Single Sisters" and the presbyteral ordination of women, as described by Beverly Prior Smaby, are mentioned only in passing.³	. . .

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