Editor's Notes

This issue will appear as the second summit of Early Ibero- and Anglo-Americanists convenes in Providence. The second gathering of the summit has broadened the scope of inquiry by inviting scholars treating the literatures of the various colonizing cultures. I was put in mind of the strangest inadequacy in the understanding of early American literary culture: the lack of comment about the eighteenth-century Germans who came to North America heeding the promise of religious liberty. The faith communities that settled in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia were noteworthy for the artistry of their devotion. The music of the Moravians, the Fraktur of the Dunkers, the poetry of the Schwenkfelders constituted an expressive legacy the aesthetic equal of that generated by Anglo Americans. The abundance matches the richness of expression; there is more surviving eighteenth-century German-American poetry than there is Anglo-American poetry for the colonial period. The 1956 German-language anthology, Pennsylvania German Poetry, edited by John Joseph Stoudt and published as volume 20 of the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society printed approximately 300 poems by 150 poets as an introductory sampling of the manuscript treasures housed in Bethlehem, Ephrata, the Library of Congress, Columbia University, and the Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center. It was a tantalizing first glimpse of a literature of vast extent. It is interesting to consider that while Susanna Wright, whose extraordinary corpus of spiritual poetry has recently come to light, was composing her works on the banks of the Susquehanna, there were a sisterhood of like-minded theological poets writing in her vicinity in another language—Veronika Funk, Anna Lichty, Martha Elizabeth Spangenberg, Johanna Sophia Molther (Baroness von Seidewitz), Henrietta Beningna Justina von Zinzendorf, and the wonderful Anna Nitschmann. Where is the scholarship on these poets? To the extent it exists, it appears in historical journals devoted to the various German Church traditions. But there is reason to believe that the situation is changing. Allen Viehmeyer has been translating the hymns of the Ephrata cloister in English. Patrick Erben has been appointed an OIEAHC fellow to refine his study of F. D. Pastorius for publication in the Institute series. Jeff Bach has just published a study of the theology of Conrad Beisel, the visionary leader of the Ephrata community. And A. Greg Roeber has generated a stream of insightful work on the legal history, book history, and cultural history of early German-America. Perhaps the time has come anticipated by Stoudt a half-century ago, when a flowering of knowledge about this profound early American literature will take place.

Hill and Wang's Winter 2005 list includes advisory editor Philip F. Gura's Jonathan Edwards, America's Evangelical, an interpretive biography intended for the general reader. The book helps inaugurate the publisher's new series of "American Portraits."