![]() The theologian and mathematician Johann Kelpius-founder of the Woman in the Wilderness community-calculated that the millennium would arrive in 1694, and he led forty male settlers from Germany to present-day Germantown, Pennsylvania, to await the event. ![]() All four settlements were founded in Pennsylvania around a migrant community within or near William Penn's "tolerant" Quaker territory. ![]() Bohemia Manor (1683–1727), Woman in the Wilderness (1694–1720), Bethlehem (1741–1844), and the Ephrata Cloister (1732–1934) were founded by Labadists, German Pietists, Moravians, and Seventh Day Baptists respectively-all sects that had been branded as apostate or heretical by the mainline Calvinist and Lutheran Churches in Europe. Most of these new utopians were refugees from religious persecution in Europe. The continent provided a vast canvas upon which Anabaptists, radical Pietists, and millenarians painted their visions of Christian perfectionism. The cultural impact of More's novel on actual utopian experimentation is difficult to measure more certain is the convergence of colonialist expansion, religious dissention, and millenarianism that opened North America to European utopian impulses during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The three texts that most profoundly shaped utopian thought in the Western world-Plato's Republic, Acts 2:42–47 in the New Testament, and Utopia-each describe an ideal society wherein property is shared by the entire community. More's novel also cemented the link between utopianism and communalism in the Western consciousness. Utopia inaugurated a genre of speculative fiction in the West that imagined the possibility of perfect societies existing outside the confines of Europe. More's satirical fiction imagines an idyllic island republic ruled by reason where property is shared communally, the population of cities is controlled by resettlement, and wars are fought by mercenaries from among the islanders' warlike neighbors. Thomas More coined the word "utopia"-a neologism from the Greek ou, "no or not," and topos, "place"-in his 1516 work "De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia" ("Concerning the highest state of the republic and the new island Utopia" translated most often simply as Utopia). Each movement was greeted with a mix of revulsion and fascination from within the dominant culture, and their experiments were also registered by the nation's literary elite, who, like Sedgwick, could be simultaneously seduced and repulsed by the new utopianism. Owenists, Fourierists, Oneida Perfectionists, Mormons, Amana Inspirationalists, and New Icarians all founded utopian communities in America between 18. ![]() The first half of the nineteenth century ushered in a golden era of utopian experimentation. Sedgwick's conflicted assessment of Shaker culture is representative of the mixture of skepticism, abhorrence, and grudging respect extended by Americans to their brethren living in utopian communities during the same period. In the midst of this mostly flattering portrayal, however, she also observes that these communities "have been visited by foreigners and strangers from all parts of our union-all are shocked or disgusted by some of the absurdities of the shaker faith, but none have withheld their admiration from the results of their industry, ingenuity, order, frugality, and temperance" (p. She also praises the members for their "skillful cultivation" and "snow white linen" (p. 178–181) while also engaging in an enthusiastic bustle of industry around looms and the community dairy. In her novel Redwood (1824), Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867) describes the Shaker villages of Lebanon and Hancock, Massachusetts, as a "religious republic" divided into communal "family" units "whose members are clothed from one store-house, fed at the same board, and perform their domestic worship together" (pp. ![]()
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