Relying on Runaways: Women and the Moravian Church in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Abstract

In her 1772 memoir, Sarah Chapman relays an exciting tale of daring escape from her parent’s home in December 1752. She was seventeen, single, and determined to join the Moravian Church, a new group originating in eastern Saxony. Women like Sarah—usually young and single—saw in the Moravians an alternative to settled life. This article explores the place of the Moravian Church as a disruptive organization which built congregations of young people who separated themselves from home and family, often dramatically retold in spiritual memoirs. Their Hussite proto-Reformation influences, combined with the charismatic leadership of the Saxon Count Zinzendorf, provided space for diverse forms of female participation. Through tales of run-away women, I argue that studying Moravian women disrupts the traditional conception of church creation as predominantly male and instead reconceives the religious fracturing of eighteenth-century Protestantism as something intimately experienced by women, even those young and single.