One morning in 1737 when David Zeisberger (1721–1808) was sixteen years old he disappeared from the Moravian community of Heerendijk in the Netherlands. Moravian leaders had no idea of his whereabouts until he turned up in Savannah, Georgia, in January 1738. Here he was reunited with his parents, who were part of a small Moravian community in that town. The incident exemplifies both Zeisberger’s independent mindset and his life-long involvement with the global work of the Moravians. Zeisberger would never return to Europe. In 1740 he was part of the group that founded the Moravian communities of Nazareth and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site). In 1743 he began learning the languages of the Native Americans and in 1745 he made his first journey to the Onondaga people in New York. For most of his life, Zeisberger lived as a Christian missionary among the Native Americans in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. During these sixty-three years of missionary work, he kept a diary, compiled dictionaries and grammar books, and wrote hundreds of letters.

Of Zeisberger’s letters 362 have now been edited and published, together with other relevant texts such as excerpts from the minutes of the administrative boards (Provincial Elders’ Conference in Bethlehem and the Unity Elders’ Conference in Germany), memoranda and relevant letters from others. These materials provide additional information on the wider (Moravian) context in which Zeisberger wrote his letters and provide comprehensive insight into the interaction of this small Protestant group with the Native population of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Hermann Wellenreuther (1941–2021), Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Göttingen, collected and edited the materials over a timespan of several decades. Previously, Wellenreuther and his colleagues published Zeisberger’s diaries and reports from 1772–81.Footnote ¹ As the diaries were intended to be shared with other Moravian communities where they were read in public worship meetings, they are of a different character from the letters that are of a more confidential nature. Thus, and also because the publication of the letters covers a much longer period than the (published) diaries, this two-volume set is able to offer much additional information.

The modestly titled ‘preliminary remark’ (Vorbemerkung) offers a thorough introduction to the historical context in which the letters were written: the European colonisation of vast areas in the American northeast and its rapid westward expansion, the competition between the British and the French, the position of the native population and especially the effects these developments had on the people living north of the Ohio River. The history of the Moravians, their theology, organisation and customs are not explained here; all this had been adequately laid out in the publication of Zeisberger’s correspondence to which the author refers.

The purpose of a documentary edition is to provide access to source material that is otherwise difficult to access. The originals may be difficult to read, they may be located in repositories in different places around the world or there may be questions about the correct wording of the original text. The goal is to establish a reliable text. In the case of the Zeisberger correspondence, Wellenreuther has been successful in providing access to this material.

The letters are presented chronological order. Each letter is preceded by a short summary that will help readers find their way through the material. People and events, mentioned in the text, are explained in concise yet informative annotations. Besides transcribing the written documents, these annotations represent a tremendous amount of effort and the author has succeeded excellently in this enormous task. In addition, there are helpful glossaries, including a glossary of names, of geographical places and of foreign terms. Another helpful tool is the list of the included letters and a list of the additional materials. And although none of the page numbers in the latter list are correct, this does not cause much of a problem, because the texts are all printed in chronological order.

One could note other small editorial mishaps: e.g. the glossary of foreign terminology lists all English verbs under t (for to); the quotation marks with foreign terms in the glossary switch between German and American quotation marks, and there is an unusually high number of typos. Of course, these oversights are understandable considering the untimely death of Hermann Wellenreuther in April 2021, while he was in the midst of getting the manuscript ready for publication. Fortunately, his widow, Claudia Schnurmann, Professor of History at the University of Hamburg, saw to the completion of the two-volume magnum opus of 1,459 pages and ensured Wellenreuther’s project was published posthumously.

As with every documentary edition, the editor needs to make decisions. The author may be commended for not using the equal sign (=) to represent the double hyphen found in older German Kurrent and Fraktur texts (Hungers=Noth instead of Hungers-Noth) which seems to happen so often in recent German historical literature. The author decided to follow the punctuation of the original. This is unfortunate as it affects the accessibility of the text. Therefore, most German guidelines for the textual edition of historical texts advise silently adapting punctuation according to current rules. Text written in German Kurrent script often switch to Latin script for names or (loan)words. In this publication, the author decided to use roman type where the original used Kurrent and italics when the original used Latin script. In the opinion of this reviewer, it is unnecessary to make this distinction, and the resulting uneven appearance of the printed text could have been avoided. And had it been done consistently, this would have led to transcriptions such as ‘unobservirt’ (letter no. 226) as German writers knew to distinguish between foreign roots (in Latin script) and German prefixes and suffixes (in German script).

Zeisberger’s letters are valuable for many reasons. Zeisberger documents the interaction of a European missionary with the Native Americans (predominantly Lenape) over a long period of time and in great detail. His letters describe his decades-long life among the Native population, his attempts to establish Christianity among them and their responses to his efforts. He also records the continuous pressure European settlers were putting on the Native people, their movements across the landscape, the construction of new settlements, their abandonment and how he accompanied them on their repeated moves away from the areas dominated by European colonists. Zeisberger’s letters describe the relations between the various Native tribes, their resistance to the colonists and the building tensions culminating in the killing of ninety-six people in the Moravian settlement of Gnadenhutten, Ohio, by militiamen from Pennsylvania in 1782. Zeisberger’s letters give insight into daily life, into the food people ate, the treatment of illnesses, hunting, clearing land and travelling. Sometimes the letters include anecdotes such as how children inadvertently broke the Communion chalice when they sat on his luggage (p. 322) or how a bear stole the ham he had brought along from Bethlehem (pp. 150–1). The main topic of the letters, however, is the spread of the Gospel. Although the letters were part of the official correspondence, they are always personal and warm.

The editor has succeeded in bringing together the vast correspondence of one of the most significant missionaries among the American Indians during the eighteenth century. There is no question this publication will make an enormous contribution to the study of the cultural interactions between European colonisers and American Indians during the eighteenth century. For the first time, this body of correspondence is brought together from archival repositories on both sides of the Atlantic.