An interesting aspect of the nineteenth-century German Protestant awakening (Erweckungsbewegung) was the various attempts at forming women's deaconess communities within the Lutheran churches in Europe and North America. There were a number of factors that led to the development of these communities, including the new availability of “awakened” and educated middle-class women seeking vocations outside of the home and the increasing desire of the churches to address the social problems in their territories (the “Inner Missions” movement). One of the most important of these deaconess communities was the Lutheran Deaconess Institute founded at Neuendettelsau in Bavaria in 1854 by Lutheran pastor Wilhelm Löhe. This book is a study of this community from its founding until Löhe's death in 1872, focusing on the factors leading to the development of a distinctive religious culture within this community.

Löhe himself was a distinctive figure within this German awakening. A highly intelligent and educated pastor, he came into conflict with church officials and was sent as a sort of exile to a church in the small Bavarian village of Neuendettelsau in 1837. In this unlikely place, Löhe developed an impressive complex of diaconal and missionary institutions that trained and sent people into ministries around the world; Löhe himself became an international figure within the Lutheranism of the time. His was an interesting combination of awakened Lutheran confessionalism with a romantic and organic understanding of the church and its sacraments, based on his appreciation of the early Christian church.

Certainly, these factors were important in his founding of the Lutheran Deaconess community in Neuendettelsau in 1854. Löhe attempted to give shape to the emerging social ministry efforts of German Protestant women by structuring a community for them based on his vision of such efforts in the early Christian church and alongside models of community generally provided by the Roman Catholic orders for women. German Protestant women joining this community at Neuendettelsau committed themselves to a disciplined, celibate, and permanent community of women involved in social ministry activities. Though not the only such community founded by Lutherans in the nineteenth century, it certainly was a distinctive part of this movement.

In this book, Judith Böttcher examines the development of this community, focusing on the shaping of its ideals of itself and on its aspects of vocation and communal identity. She sees a tension (though not a full conflict) in this development between the ideals that Löhe and other male pastors had for the community and the ways in which the deaconesses themselves wished to develop the community. Böttcher uses both historical records from Löhe and the community, as well as social-scientific study of these rituals and symbols of the community itself, in order to understand these sometimes-complicated dynamics. Of greatest importance in this study are the rituals and symbolism of the initiation of women into the community (as well as other communal actions) and how the ideal of the community itself was developed and reflected in these actions.

For nineteenth-century German Protestant women, joining a deaconess community such as the one at Neuendettelsau was a major commitment, and many of the deaconesses saw their work as a religious vocation, in more than just the typical Lutheran sense. They were set aside, consecrated, for a specifically religious work. For many of these women, such a life under communal discipline gave them, ironically enough, a degree of freedom and self-definition that went beyond what they could have achieved in general German Lutheran society of the time. They were able to receive training and education, as well as participate in the shaping of their own community. There were limits to this, however, and Löhe attempted to maintain his own control over the community and the women who constituted it. In the long run, it is possible that the nature of this community even led to a slowing of women's religious autonomy.

Böttcher has written a deeply researched and thoughtfully nuanced study of this deaconess community and the women who constituted it. She has plumbed a rich archive of materials on the life of this community, and her application of social-scientific methods to this material is both appropriate and highly illuminating. Her study leads the reader beyond a binary understanding of women's religious lives in the nineteenth century and invites parallels with similar communities of the time. This is a work that will be very useful to our further understanding of women and religious communities in the modern era.