Browsing by Author "Ames, Alexander Lawrence"
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Item Heavenly handwriting, teutonic type: faith and script in German Pennsylvania, ca. 1683-1855(University of Delaware, 2014) Ames, Alexander Lawrence"All nations have something peculiar to their writing," wrote Johann Merken in a ca. 1782 German-language writing manual. The German-speaking peoples of Central Europe, for whom ideas of nation, peoplehood, and faith practice were closely intertwined, cultivated unique lettering traditions known as "Fraktur," or neo-gothic, "broken-letter" type and script. The German-speaking settlers of early Pennsylvania carried vibrant manuscript illumination traditions involving Fraktur letter forms with them to the New World. Those manuscripts comprise a rich record of Pennsylvania German religious life. This thesis explores the European antecedents of types and scripts in America, the spiritualistic heritage of Pennsylvania German settlers, and the teaching of reading and writing among two groups of Pennsylvania Germans to assess the spiritual foundations of their manuscript practices and consider the documents' utility as indicators of cultural change. The study suggests the politically and religiously charged heritage of print and manuscript Fraktur letter forms, and the extent to which Protestant spiritual practice relied on reading and writing religious texts. A quantitative methodology documents that the Vorschrift, or teacher-made manuscript writing sample, diverged from baroque European writing samples between ca. 1750 and 1850, suggesting the form's association with changes in literacy education at the national, state, and community levels.Item The letter and the spirit: calligraphy, manuscripts, and popular piety in German Pennsylvania, ca. 1750-1850(University of Delaware, 2018) Ames, Alexander LawrenceThe early German-speaking inhabitants of southeastern Pennsylvania cultivated calligraphic and manuscript arts as part of their popular piety and devotional practice. The documents they produced have long captured the attention of scholars and collectors, and they exude the Pietistic spiritual fervor of a bygone age. Yet, despite their colorful religious contents and fascinating connections to everyday spiritual experience, few historians of American religion have paid much attention to the artifacts. Moreover, the artworks’ makers and users remain largely absent from sweeping narratives of early America’s spiritual legacy. This dissertation seeks to situate the documents, their makers, and their users in the context of early American religious and intellectual history, highlighting the texts’ value as source material for understanding the literary diversity of early American life. It applies theories and methods derived from the fields of religious history, intellectual history, book history, material culture, sociology, and print/manuscript culture studies to a set of text-based primary sources that have by and large been treated as decorative folk art by local-historical scholars. The dissertation proposes a new approach to the study of Pennsylvania German manuscript culture that more closely aligns the field to the analytical priorities of religious scholars and book historians. It situates the Pennsylvania tradition in a comparative context and proposes new directions for early-American book history and studies of manuscript culture, while enhancing understandings of the long, transatlantic history of Protestantism.