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Introduction: Marriage, Mission, and Migrants in the Atlantic World
- The University of North Carolina Press
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1 introduction Marriage, Mission, and Migrants in the Atlantic World This book is about a marriage, specifically, the marriage of a woman named Maria Barbara Knoll and a doctor named Jean-François Reynier, two very different people from very different corners of Europe who were drawn into the historic events that shaped the Atlantic World in the eighteenth century. Throughout their obscure but storied lives, Knoll and Reynier resided on three continents, endured four colonial wars, and participated in conquest, slavery, religious missions, and revivals. They interacted with colonists, Indians, rebellious slaves, and imperial troops. They were religious seekers who frequently found themselves at odds with the communities in which they lived. They were also frequently at odds with each other, and marital tension and scandal threatened to tear them apart. Their travels and adventures led them through so many different places and episodes of the Atlantic World that their lives provide an invaluable insight and perspective into how that world functioned in the eighteenth century and the different ways that women and men experienced it. The story of this marriage begins on 25 March 1740, when the young, anxious , strong-spirited Maria Barbara Knoll awaited her wedding ceremony in the Schloß (palace) Marienborn in Wetteravia, near the free imperial city of Frankfurt am Main in the German territories. There was good reason for her anxiety. By evening’s end, she would be bound in holy matrimony to JeanFrancois Reynier, and as of yet, she had never properly met the man. Maria Barbara Knoll had journeyed to Marienborn to join a budding religious movement committed to a communal spiritual lifestyle and an elevated role for women. Upon arrival, she did not know that the group’s leaders would ask her to marry a member of their group whom she had never met. When they did ask—she was not forced—she reluctantly agreed. As if marrying a stranger was not enough, soon after the wedding the newlyweds were scheduled to cross the Atlantic Ocean together, but not for a honeymoon. Because of Reynier’s religious zeal and medical skills, church leaders had selected him 2 Introduction to serve in a mission in the Dutch colony of Suriname in the tropics of South America. They had selected Knoll to go not so much because of her individual skills and abilities, but because she was his wife and they needed couples working in their mission fields. Suriname lay in the heart of the broad plantation belt in the colonies that stretched from the Chesapeake Bay in North America to southeastern Brazil . The newlyweds were supposed to work in a mission intended to convert Carib, Arawak, and African inhabitants to Christianity. Almost all of the missionaries who had been sent to this post since it opened five years earlier had either perished from disease, or some other misfortune, or returned prematurely while still extremely ill. Knoll had received all of this news during the previous three weeks and may have been in some shock as the wedding ceremony proceeded and the new plan for her life began to unfold. The bride hoped that she would perform everything properly during the upcoming ceremony. It was, after all, a complicated, ritualistic affair. And Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the leader of the renewed Unitas Fratrum , or Moravian Church, was in attendance. Members of the small community crowded into Schloß Marienborn’s great Saal—a spacious ballroomlike interior where liturgical gatherings took place. The men wore their finest wigs, coats, vests, breeches, and knee stockings and stood to one side of the Saal. The women stood opposite, wearing the distinct female clothing that was the religious group’s trademark: long dresses, tight-fitting white hoods, and colored ribbons under the chin. Maria Barbara Knoll wore the same. Everyone sang hymns (Count Zinzendorf sang loudly “from the heart”), accompanied by string and brass instruments and perhaps an organ. They also held Communion and a “love feast,” a communal celebration with tea and rolls. The long ceremony carried on late into the candlelit evening. While the bride and groom stood together in front of the community members, the preacher solemnly explained the spiritual meaning of marriage and then completed the service. Thereafter, further ritual meetings and counseling continued well into the night, followed by ritualistic consummation of the marriage.1 Maria Barbara Knoll came from one of the German territories and was probably Lutheran. Other than that, we know nothing about her before her marriage in Marienborn...