How One Spends a Useful Visit: The Letters of Friederica Göttlich Braun in the Eastern West Indies

Abstract

Bibiana Friederica Göttlich Braun (1725–1807) served as a Moravian missionary in the Eastern West Indies from 1769 to 1791. This article contains translations of three letters she produced during her service. She composed the first letter to John Ettwein, a church administrator in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, soon after she arrived on the island of St. Croix in 1769. She wrote the other two letters to her friend in Bethlehem, Anna Johanna Seidel, from the islands of St. Thomas (1772) and Antigua (1775). These later letters are rare examples of eighteenth-century letters written by a woman to another woman about her activities as a female missionary in the Caribbean. The collection of letters as a whole helps to inform our modern understanding of female contributions to the Moravian mission fields.