Colonial Pennsylvania stands out among the British colonies for the size and dynamism of its German population, a factor of tremendous importance to the province's history and culture. Amidst a growing body of work on the various German groups in Pennsylvania, especially the ever-fascinating Moravians, Patrick Erben has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the colony's culture through his focus on ideas and practices of translation that helped connect Germans to their English and indigenous American neighborhoods in Penn's Woods. The language of community they spoke was not a secular, sociological one but a deeply spiritual one. Indeed, what Erben has produced is an intriguing reconstruction of the radical Protestant vision of Pennsylvania's potential, and how German Pietists and Quakers put that into practice in letters, texts, songs – and even silence, for some the purest language of the spirit.

Colonial Pennsylvania was a Babel of languages and peoples. Therein lay its great promise and appeal for radical Protestants. For them, Babel was not simply shorthand for diversity. It was a crucial part of mankind's sinful legacy, the discordance of tongues and ideas that had long separated humans from their savior. Responding in no small part to the religious divisions and subsequent conflicts within the Holy Roman Empire, German-speakers of a more mystical persuasion hoped and argued for the possibility of overcoming Babel and finding the common spiritual language that could allow people to express and share their common Christian essence and aspirations.

Erben provides a much-needed account of the connections between English and German religious traditions that gave the Pennsylvania experiment its special edge. Jacob Boehme, Jan Amos Comenius, the Rosicrucian manifestos, the Philadelphian Society and more formed the immediate heritage of the pietistically inclined people who hoped to find in Pennsylvania the spiritual possibilities they increasingly despaired of obtaining in Europe. The focus of Erben's account is the period of Pennsylvania's founding in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with two final chapters showing how these concerns persisted into the later eighteenth century.

After introducing the central idea of his study, “the utopian desire to use translation and multilingual communication as potent tools for distilling a common spiritual idiom from the multiplicities of languages, faiths, and cultures” (3), and demonstrating its roots in (mostly) German mystical and pietistic thought, Erben moves to the late seventeenth-century connections between German Pietists, William Penn and Quaker spirituality that persuaded key figures in Erben's story, like Francis Daniel Pastorius and Johannes Kelpius, to see Pennsylvania as a land of religious possibility. He then looks at the translingual spiritual efforts of these and other radical German Protestants, especially Mennonites, Moravians, and the famous community at Ephrata, and their Quaker connections, once they have planted themselves in America. This involves, among other things, a close study of Pastorius's imaginative “Honey-Comb” manuscript, the role of music and hymns in bridging cultural and linguistic gaps with their English and indigenous neighbors, and the significance of the translation and publication of the Dutch Mennonite classic, The Martyr's Mirror, in reviving a sense of religious community during the political turbulence of the mid-eighteenth century.

The book opens up a number of issues for students of early modern culture through its sophisticated attention to issues, like translation and hymnody, that mattered deeply to the (mostly) men Erben has brought together in this volume. Primarily he does so by showing how all-pervasive the spiritual concerns and impulses were among this outstandingly brilliant and unusually creative group of colonists. Originally from Germany himself, Erben's facility with the wide range of texts – and especially a remarkable manuscript legacy – produced by these colonists opens an important new window on the vitality of colonial American culture. In word, song, text, and person these colonists forged all sorts of fervent connections that the usual tendency to focus on particular groups or on conflicts overlooks. For example, the Keithian schism figures as a pivotal event, but Erben's interest is in how his subjects worked to heal this unwelcome outbreak of Babel.

As with many books published by the Omohundro Institute, the book could be shorter and tighter. Erben often writes as if he's not just talking about “English Quaker and German radical Pietist immigrants” (6), but the best parts of the book are when he goes into specifics without worrying about wider relevance. Of course, to do so is also to admit that this vision of community, for all its inclusive aspirations, had its own exclusive, sectarian quality.