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Reviews of Books
| Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata. By Jeff Bach. Pennsylvania German History and Culture Series, Number 3. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press and the Pennsylvania German Society. Pp. xx, 282. $35.00.)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe
, Evanston, Ill.
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Finding documentation about the Ephrata Cloister is difficult, and deciphering the mystical prose used by those who created the community is even more daunting. In this long-needed ethnography of Ephrata, Jeff Bach sets out to contextualize and explain the theology that drove Conrad Beissel to establish his community of celibate Protestant mystics along the Cocalico Creek in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the 1730s. To do so, he relies not only on a broad knowledge of early modern Lutheran Pietist movements in Europe and North America but also on archaeological evidence that permits him to look into the daily lives of the Ephrata community with greater insight than strict reliance on written documentation would allow. Primarily interested in asserting the place of Ephrata under the Protestant Pietist umbrella, Bach also aims to correct the work of Julius Sachse in German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania, 1694–1708 (1895). |
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Bach's introduction offers a working definition of terms, including mysticism, a fleeting overview of the development of Pietism in early modern Germany, and a brief narrative history of the Cloister. He then moves on to seven ethnographic chapters. The first two deal specifically with religious thought, one focused on the personal theology of Ephrata's founder Conrad Beissel (1691–1768). His contemporaries and successors share a second chapter. The subsequent five chapters analyze the theological underpinnings of Ephrata's ritual, gender relations, language, art, and magic. The ethnographic format necessarily leads to some repetition, particularly of theological concepts, but the utility of understanding each concept in its particular context makes the repetition worthwhile. |
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Beissel emerged from the unstable world of late seventeenth-century Germany. He was born in the Electoral Palatinate, which Bach emphasizes was significantly influenced by Pietism. Like many of those who would eventually flee to Beissel's Cloister on the Cocalico, the group's founder was orphaned; he had to fend for himself as an itinerant baker's apprentice. Part of his itinerancy resulted from a tendency to become involved in radical Pietist circles. And, at least once, Beissel's master's wife desired more than his bread, and the master sent Beissel packing. Critically, Beissel was at best a journeyman, never a master, until he founded his Cloister. |
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Bach hypothesizes that Beissel likely became familiar with the mysticism of Jacob Boehme while working for a baker in Heidelberg. Although previous authors accepted a link that Sachse drew between Beissel and the amorphous Rosicrucian movement, Bach argues that Boehme's mystic Protestant Pietism served as the fundamental source for the beliefs and practices adhered to by Beissel and others at the Cloister. However, the overlap between Boehmist and Rosicrucian mystic imagery implies that they are not mutually exclusive categories. Could Beissel have been a Boehmist and a Rosicrucian? |
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