As I sit here working on Francis Daniel Pastorius this afternoon, I see that Patrick Erben's A New Harmony of the Spirits has just been published by UNC Press. Cribbing now from the UNC website:
In early Pennsylvania, translation served as a utopian tool creating harmony across linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences. Patrick Erben challenges the long-standing historical myth--first promulgated by Benjamin Franklin--that language diversity posed a threat to communal coherence. He deftly traces the pansophist and Neoplatonist philosophies of European reformers that informed the radical English and German Protestants who founded the "holy experiment." Their belief in hidden yet persistent links between human language and the word of God impelled their vision of a common spiritual idiom. Translation became the search for underlying correspondences between diverse human expressions of the divine and served as a model for reconciliation and inclusiveness.
Drawing on German and English archival sources, Erben examines iconic translations that engendered community in colonial Pennsylvania, including William Penn's translingual promotional literature, Francis Daniel Pastorius's multilingual poetics, Ephrata's "angelic" singing and transcendent calligraphy, the Moravians' polyglot missions, and the common language of suffering for peace among Quakers, Pietists, and Mennonites. By revealing a mystical quest for unity, Erben presents a compelling counternarrative to monolingualism and Enlightenment empiricism in eighteenth-century America.
I'm looking forward to reading this soon!
On the other hand, modern sociologists like Robert Putnam at Harvard have shown that diversity destroys community.
Posted by: bob sykes | June 08, 2012 at 08:19 AM
Bob--thanks for joining the conversation. I'd be surprised if diversity of all kinds, always destroys community. That would be a shocking finding. Without yet having read the book -- but knowing Patrick's other work and some of the earlier literature on colonial Pennsylvania -- I'm guessing this shows that people from different language backgrounds and from different but allied religious backgrounds were able to come together to create a harmonious community. Their shared commitment to reform of corrupt and war-like European society brought them together and from those diverse backgrounds but shared interest they were able to make a better world.
I've written some about this as well -- not so much on the pluralism as on the commitment to reform here:
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2009/08/seventeeth-century-quaker-legal-thought.html
That post has links to a couple of articles I've written on this as well.
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | June 08, 2012 at 12:00 PM