Content area
Full text
Moravian Women's Memoirs: Their Related Lives, 1750-1820. Trans. by Katherine M. Faull. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997. xl, 166 pp. Cloth, $34.95, ISBN 0-8156-2689-4. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-8156-0397-5.)
Katherine M. Faull's Moravian Women's Memoirs offers a glimpse into the private worlds of thirty women, each of whom lived in the Moravian congregation town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, during the second half of the eighteenth century. Every member of a Moravian congregation was expected to write or dictate a spiritual autobiography that was completed after the author's death by his or her minister. The finished memoir then became part of the congregational record and was often read at the author's funeral.
Though thousands of these documents...