Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple’s Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World by Aaron Spencer Fogelman (review)

Authoritative and erudite, yet elegantly understated in its argumentation and assertions, Fogelman’s Two Troubled Souls reads like a novel. It is a story well told, attractively formatted with a presentation page for each chapter, which is built around a quotation from one or both of the protagonist’s journals or papers. With short chapters and matter-of-fact prose, Two Troubled Souls gracefully performs the demanding balancing act of persuading like fiction while measuring the facts with historical neutrality.

Fogelman uses the correspondence of a Moravian married couple, Maria Barbara Kroll and Jean-François Reynier, tracing their religious missions and personal wanderings to reveal the network of influences and inspiration that undergirded the Atlantic World. In Fogelman’s hands, this world is no longer an intellectual construct but rather a quotidian and compelling reality. This aspect of the book alone makes it a valuable contribution to the scholarly community

It comes as no surprise that Natalie Zemon Davis is one of the book’s scholarly endorsers. Like her The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), Two Troubled Souls presents facts beautifully and evocatively, almost but not quite assuming the guise of fiction (one recalls the heated debate between Davis and Findlay about how to write history).¹ Fogleman treads the thin line between reasoning from absences and the process of reconstructing his narrative from a larger context when information is not always forthcoming. But he does so compellingly, and with integrity.

The tale uses a multitude of both strange and familiar religious manifestations and experiences as background to the couple’s experiences, touching on religious similarities and differences involving the Huguenots, Lutherans, Dunkers, Quakers, Labadists, Conrad Beissel’s Ephrata Cloister, and slave religion in Surinam and Savannah. It also explores male and female ways of apprehending the world, religion, and each other with an admirable depth of psychological understanding.

Reynier and Kroll had never met before being united in a Moravian marriage ceremony. The charismatic and controversial Count Nicolas von Zinzendorf, who performed the ceremony, may have approached Maria Barbara for sexual favors at some point prior to the wedding. Their fate as a couple decided by the community, Kroll and Reynier soon found themselves sent out on challenging missions. They had to determine how they felt about slavery, about ecumenical mission initiatives, and about social and economic customs that they had never confronted before. Reynier, who made his living as a physician (although without formal training) was subject to bouts of what now might be termed bipolar disorder. He alienated many communities into which the couple entered, and his wife left him several times. She had to learn to assert herself to have her own sexual and spiritual needs met.

Fogelman has done a masterful job of deftly contrasting the two partners’ perspectives and sensitively describing their responses to the vagaries of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Always smartly aware of the scholarly community, Fogelman commendably eschews theory in favor of lived and textured reality. Nothing persuades as well as a good story, and Fogelman has certainly written one.