Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple's Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World

by Aaron Spencer Fogleman

Jean-Francois 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.

321 pages, Hardcover

First published December 9, 2013

About the author

Aaron Spencer Fogleman is Professor of History at Northern Illinois University.

Reviews

[Alexander Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book examines the broader Atlantic world by examining the journey of a quirky couple who travel all over the Atlantic world as missionaries and spiritual seekers. The two main characters have a life story that is crazy and interesting. The book is well written, readable, and could easily be read in a couple of days. One of the main themes that Fogleman reiterates throughout the whole book is that people go into the Atlantic system expecting to change it, but they become that ones that get changed instead. This book would be a good choice for someone who wants to read a history book that almost reads something like a novel since it follows the lives of two people with pretty big personalities.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting lens to look at the different religious sects in this time period. I learned a lot about the Moravians!

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful look at a real couple's eighteenth century journey through the Atlantic World. We watch as the couple set out to change the world, fought, struggled, and sought a spiritual renewal. In the end, it wasn't the couple who changed the Atlantic World, but the Atlantic World that changed the couple.