In Two Troubled Souls, Aaron Spencer Fogleman examines the lives of Jean-François and Maria Barbara Reynier, two religious seekers in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. These Moravian missionaries travelled far afield from their European origins. Over a period of decades, they met, worked and prayed with Europeans, Africans and Indians in places as disparate as Pennsylvania and Suriname. By examining a couple who lived and worked in such unusual circumstances, Fogleman is able to do many things: to show some of the ways in which Atlantic world systems meshed with each other, to examine how a European couple might be changed by new experiences and to consider how gendered expectations of men and women shaped their experiences.

Both Jean-François and Maria Barbara were unusual individuals. Jean-François Reynier, a committed Moravian and self-taught doctor, first travelled to America as an indentured servant in 1728. After a miserable term of servitude, he briefly joined the religious community at Ephrata before returning to Europe. In Wetteravia, he agreed to an arranged marriage to Maria Barbara Knoll, a young woman who had joined the Moravians seeking salvation and autonomy. Over the course of their 35-year marriage, they worked as missionaries and medical providers to African slaves and Indians, first in a failed mission in Suriname and then (more briefly) on the island of St. Thomas. They later travelled to Pennsylvania, still seeking religious answers, and lived out their final years in Georgia.

One of the great strengths of the book is the way in which both Jean-François and Maria Barbara emerge as unforgettable individuals. Jean-François Reynier was an ambitious and determined man, with the will and ability to teach himself medicine, to study multiple foreign languages and to cross the ocean in search of new goals again and again. A devoted, but often unhappy religious seeker, he wrote letters and hymns about his missionary dreams of working with various Atlantic world peoples: “Lamb!” he began one hymn, “Give forth success!/Let also the Caribs and Indians/Along with those from Moorland/Learn that thou wast pierced” (104). Maria Barbara Reynier, as a young woman left home and family to join the Moravians, then accepted the risk of an arranged marriage. She became a committed and determined missionary and nurse, and showed a lifelong capacity to forge friendships with other religious women.

Both, however, were also deeply flawed and their marriage was troubled. Jean-François found it difficult to get along with anybody for any length of time, which makes their lifelong marriage—troubled from the beginning—that much more remarkable. He once wrote of his marriage as “nothing other than punishment” and described his wife as “a good switch”, who “is just as fitting to me as a switch is to disobedient children” (98). But at another point in his life, when the two had separated from each other, he wrote to Maria Barbara that if she ever wished to return, she would “always be loved and welcomed by me” (187). For her part, Maria Barbara, who had probably been drawn to the Moravians in part because they offered leadership roles to women, found it hard to live with (much less submit to) her difficult husband. At times she sought separation from him and, at least once, was unfaithful.

In focusing on this couple who lived in the German territories, in Suriname, in the Caribbean, in Pennsylvania and in Georgia, Fogleman set himself the difficult task of describing economic systems, racial relations and religious tensions in many parts of the Atlantic world. He does a fine job of providing detailed context and attention-getting detail about these many worlds—whether describing Moravian brides in “long dresses, tight-fitting hoods, and coloured ribbons under the chin” (2) or the economic divisions of plantations in Suriname, with planters in “spacious houses away from the river” and slaves in “round plaster huts with palm leaf roofs” (134). Fogleman is particularly good at describing the beliefs and practices of the many small religious groups that the Reyniers encountered and in explaining why theological differences mattered so much to men like Jean-François Reynier. The book vividly places Jean-François and Maria Barbara Reynier in context, describing in detail their journeys, the communities they lived in and their mental worlds.

In the end, however, the Reyniers themselves (and especially Jean-François) pose a problem for the historian. Jean-François emerges more clearly from the page than Maria Barbara, for the obvious reason that he wrote more. Whether for good or ill, he experienced much that the Atlantic World had to offer—as an indentured servant, a doctor, a religious seeker, a missionary and an author. And yet, wherever he travelled and whatever he did, his story was much the same. He sought perfection in religious communities and, when he could not find it, he grew angry, lashed out and left. As a young man, he joined and then left the Ephrata community in Pennsylvania. Later, in Suriname, he sent angry letters to Count Zinzendorf “blam[ing] his colleagues for the mission’s failures” (126). Twenty years later he was back in Pennsylvania, where, having taken offense at the Moravians, he wrote a scandalous autobiography including salacious details about Moravian sexual practices. By this time, he was living in a celibate community, but soon “grew angry” with those around him and abandoned the community (222). As this pattern repeats again and again in his life, it becomes easy to sympathize with the many contemporaries who found him irritating and difficult.

As Fogleman himself notes, Reynier “was in a position to learn a great deal from slaves and Native Americans and probably did, but he wrote overwhelmingly about himself and his usually difficult relations with the European people around him” (162-163). The book is well-researched, deeply contextualized and beautifully written. It is not the historian’s fault that Jean-François Reynier, who experienced so much, so often chose to write only about the religious conflicts raging inside and around him.