Moravian Changelings: Children, Feeling, and Religious Certainty in the Eighteenth-Century Protestant Atlantic

The Moravian Changelings recasts the history of the early Unitas Fratrum (Moravian Church) under the leadership of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. It tracks the community's elaboration of a "figure of the child"—through children, childhood, and childlikeness—and argues that they used the child and a corresponding array of affective indications to verify grace and to ground their religious certitude and eschatological identity. Through children’s expressions, play, and emotional responsiveness, Moravians sought to prove that grace could be immediately felt, institutionally confirmed, and communally sustained. The dissertation begins with the 1727 Herrnhut revival and its impact on Zinzendorf's early writings, in which children’s religious feeling is a privileged sign of Christ’s presence. It then traces the development of a radical childlike ethos into the Sifting Time crisis of the 1740s. This playful and affectionate "niedlich piety"—emphasizing Christ’s wounds, bridal ecclesiology, and liturgical experimentation—was castigated by outsiders, prompting a reassessment of the community's relationship to the child and a restructuring of leadership toward stricter oversight, in order to govern affect's ambivalence. The final chapter describes Moravian missionaries' application of niedlich piety among the enslaved of the St. Thomas and St. Jan islands. There, children’s responses both bolstered Moravian religious identity and exposed the racialized limits of Moravian universalism. Reading the archive with and against the grain, Moravian Changelings demonstrates how the child was variously employed as the solution to the problem of uncertainty and argues that the child is the site where the cost of such certainty became visible.