Moravian community’s eighteenth-century Congregational Library

As a cataloger for the Moravian community’s eighteenth-century Congregational Library in Bethlehem I am privy to one of the most important links they, like any colonial community, shared with the larger Atlantic world – their books.  While the Moravians were well known for their cultural and geographic insularity in the Americas, such isolation belies their interests outside German Protestantism and missionary activity.  The Congregational Library contains books from a wide variety of subjects suggesting that the Moravian community was aware of the larger Atlantic world. This collection of books is at odds with the traditional portrayal of the Moravians solely as missionaries to the Native Americans.

Most works are of a religious nature, as is to be expected.  These works are usually in German and range from the most basic tenants of Luther’s Protestantism to the unique scriptural insights of Zinzendorf and Moravian dogma.  The library even includes works of folk religion, including: Sensible and Christian thoughts on the Vampires or Bloodsucking Dead Which, among the Turks and on the border/frontiers of the Serbian lands, suck the blood from the living men and cattle Accompanied with all sorts of theological, philosophical and historical [things] fetched from the realm of the spirits. One would expect to find these kinds of works in any colonial community of pious Germans, and their presence in the congregational library is no surprise.

The Moravian library, however, expands thoroughly past the limited borders of theology and Christly proverbs.  Dictionaries and encyclopedias, ranging from 5 to 20 volume sets, were available to the community.  These intricate anthologies served as collections of the western world’s combined scientific knowledge, collapsing the realm of European knowledge onto a shelf in Moravian settlement, located in the newer, more sparsely settled parts of Pennsylvania or the Backwoods. Collections of laws from the various colonies and plantations of the British world kept the small German community abreast of the growing empire of which they were a tangential part.  Books on mathematics, often in the context of seamanship, explained how the world that their deity created operated on a fundamental level.  In sum, despite their location in the Backwoods of Pennsylvania, the Moravians were unusually well-connected to the Atlantic world around them.

Future postings will follow the idea established here, focusing on the unique and seemingly-unusual books found in the Moravian library and how they connect the little Bethlehem community to Europe, empire, and a rapidly-growing Atlantic world.

                                                        -Andrew Stahlhut