In this fascinating book, Michael J. Lewis explores the development of the “city of refuge” as a model for utopian community building over a three-hundred-year period. Moving from Thomas More's Utopia (drafted in Latin in 1515 and later printed in English in 1551) to Frederick Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Lewis's study joins the growing body of literature that investigates the intersection of the sacred and secular within the urban form. While scholars have traditionally treated religious and secular utopian communities as separate currents, Lewis reveals their confluence, their “underlying and essential continuity” (14). He powerfully demonstrates how, over time, these sanctuaries from the modern world inspired others to reconsider that world. In the process, the aspects of community that these religious visionaries rethought—the nature of labor, the housing of workers, the ownership of property, and the means of production—came to be the concerns of—and potential solutions for—the world they sought to escape.

Over eight chapters, Lewis documents the transmission of a set of visual motifs and forms—square plans, straight lines, round numbers—among Protestant visionary leaders frustrated with the corruptions of the world around them. These motifs and forms took on new symbolic meanings with each transfer, from England to the continent and eventually to North America. Beginning with More's Utopia, separatists realized that “city” followed “society,” that the physical form of the space in which people dwelled was in direct dialogue with the social relationships among those people. To perfect one required perfecting the other. Visionaries had differing ideas on what this meant. Albrecht Durer was the first to give More's ideas visual form, which he did through a plan for a foursquare city. Religious wars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe created the need for actual refuge cities. Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis (1619) provided a blueprint for several on both sides of the Atlantic. In the mid-eighteenth century, Count Nicholas Zinzendorf's Moravian settlements, especially the one at Herrnhaag, offered a valuable prototype not simply because it was the best synthesis of percolating ideas to date, but also because it was carried by a religious network with worldwide reach. Moravian influence can be felt in the communities built by Swabian charismatic leader George Rapp in North America, which serve as Lewis's culmination of the separatist search for urban refuge.

An architectural historian by training, Lewis provides rich readings of the landscape and built environment of these utopias, several of which never transcended the imaginations of their creators into physical form. In this beautifully illustrated work, Lewis makes ample use of architectural drawings, surviving structures, and writings by charismatic leaders as well as the various visitors—sympathetic and critical—curious about their creations. This book will appeal to a wide range of scholars of religion, from those with a general interest in utopianism and Protestant thought to those with a particular interest in the Moravians, the Rappites, and even the Shakers. (The last receive only passing mention but studies of their place-making will benefit from Lewis’s approach.) This volume is equally valuable for urban and planning historians interested in the influence of religion on the urban form.

Lewis's extended examination of the communities built by George Rapp and his followers in Pennsylvania and Indiana is particularly good. These communities are among the most fully realized and best-preserved examples of the strains of Protestant urban utopian thinking explored in the book. In these two chapters (6 and 7), Lewis demonstrates the way Rapp and his adopted son Frederick, a stone mason turned architect, sought architectural solutions for theological problems. Over a twenty-year period, the Rapps founded three successive communities for their hundreds of followers, the changes and continuity within which Lewis masterfully traces over time. At each site, Rapp built a garden labyrinth, which Lewis reveals to be a rich embodiment of the leader's theological thinking. The increasingly grand houses Rapp built for himself offered an index on his feelings about the world from which he and his followers fled. But we also learn of the emergence of new structural forms, such as the multipurpose museum and communal dwellings, and the eager embrace of new technologies. Throughout, Lewis pays careful attention to the deployment of architectural styles (Baroque, Palladian, Federal), the persistence of vernacular building traditions, and the influence of German mysticism on the forms and motifs of these communities.

Rapp's sale of his second community, New Harmony in Indiana, to Robert Dale Owen, another great social reformer, allows Lewis to pivot to the socialist refuges of the nineteenth century. But in the end, he reminds us that sacred refuges proved more successful than secular ones. Perceptive observers such as James Silk Buckingham realized it was a religious sense of mission that ultimately spelled success or failure for these communities (a reality he ignored in envisioning his own socialist utopian community). George Rapp convinced his followers to build from scratch three settlements (and abandoned two of them) within a two-decade period; Owen purchased one of these fully formed communities and could not keep it running for long. Ultimately it came down to their outlook. For the religious, these settlements were temporary way stations, provisional sanctuaries in a corrupt world. For socialists, they were meant to change the world. Their shared ideas remain powerful today, even if the forms of society they sought to create have not proven as stable as they hoped.