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9780271083285 Academic Inspection Copy

The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader

Writings by an Early American Polymath
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Francis Daniel Pastorius was one of the first German settlers to Pennsylvania and a touchstone figure of German-American cultural heritage. This monumental anthology presents a selection of his many writings in one volume.

Pastorius sailed to North America as a Pietist but found a unique home among the Quakers in Pennsylvania. Within this early modern religious context, he was a lawyer, educator, and community leader; a polymath; and a prolific writer and collector of knowledge. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Pastorius held one of the largest manuscript collections in North America and wrote voluminously in multiple languages. His collecting, curation, and dissemination represents a unique look at the ways information was stored, processed, and utilized during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in both North America and Europe. This rich selection of Pastorius’s writings on religion, education, gardening, law and community, and the colony of Pennsylvania—as well as letters, poems, and numerous encyclopedic and bibliographic works—shows the work of a true humanist in action.

Pastorius’s works have long been important to archival study of early German settlement and the Atlantic world. Now available together, transcribed, translated, and annotated, his writings will have widespread significance to the study of early American literature and history.



“The editors’ careful selection of Francis Daniel Pastorius’s writings, showcasing his thought, experience, and hope for settlement in early America, invites twenty-first-century students and scholars to explore Pastorius’s work and engage with it more fully in all of its range and complexity. Readers will reap the rewards of adding to their knowledge of Pastorius as an extraordinary thinker, author, and doer in the North Atlantic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

—Marianne S. Wokeck, author of Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America

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