Women, Race, and the Moravian Church in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Women, Race, and the Moravian Church in the Early Modern Atlantic World is an important and timely study marking a new direction for scholarship on the intersection of gender, race, and religion in the early modern Atlantic world. Tracing how the Moravian Church expanded from a few missionaries to the largest Black Protestant denomination in the Caribbean, Kaelin deftly shows the centrality of enslaved and free Black women and white female missionaries to the eighteenth-century Moravian mission. —Naomi Pullin, University of Warwick This book focuses on women’s participation in the Moravian Church during the eighteenth century, focusing on the intentional practice of international marriage and migration that supported their missionary work amongst enslaved populations in the Caribbean. It argues that white women missionaries and Black women converts played a crucial role in the history of its religious movement as the Church shifted from an ethnically German organization to a form of Black Atlantic Christianity. Kelly Kaelin is Assistant Professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Southern Indiana, USA.