Two Troubled Souls

An Eighteenth-Century Couple's Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World

By Aaron Spencer Fogleman

336 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 29 figs., 8 maps, 2 tables, appends., notes, bibl., index

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-2642-0
    Published: August 2015
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-0880-8
    Published: December 2013
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-4019-6
    Published: December 2013

Buy this Book

For Professors:
Free E-Exam Copies

To purchase online via an independent bookstore, visit Bookshop.org

Awards & distinctions

2014 James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History, American Historical Association

Jean-François Reynier, a French Swiss Huguenot, and his wife, Maria Barbara Knoll, a Lutheran from the German territories, crossed the Atlantic several times and lived among Protestants, Jews, African slaves, and Native Americans from Suriname to New York and many places in between. While they preached to and doctored many Atlantic peoples in religious missions, revivals, and communal experiments, they encountered scandals, bouts of madness, and other turmoil, including within their own marriage. Aaron Spencer Fogleman's riveting narrative offers a lens through which to better understand how individuals engaged with the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and how men and women experienced many of its important aspects differently.

Reynier's and Knoll's lives illuminate an underside of empire where religious radicals fought against church authority and each other to find and spread the truth; where Atlantic peoples had spiritual, medical, and linguistic encounters that authorities could not always understand or control; and where wives disobeyed husbands to seek their own truth and opportunity.

About the Author

Aaron Spencer Fogleman is professor of history at Northern Illinois University and author of Jesus is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America and Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775.
For more information about Aaron Spencer Fogleman, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

“An unusually revealing view of the transcontinental networks and radical thought and behavior in the tumultuous 18th-century Atlantic world. Recommended. All levels/libraries.”--Choice

“A compelling, deeply researched, and accessibly written microhistory of one couple’s journeys throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.”--William and Mary Quarterly

"Fogleman offers a lens through which to better understand how individuals engaged with the 18th century Atlantic World and how men and women experienced many of its important aspects differently."--NIU Today

“A rich microhistorical narrative.”--Journal of American History

"A well-told story that invites curiosity and reflection."--Georgia Historical Quarterly

"Exhaustively researched and beautifully written."--American Historical Review