H. B. Eggert, Sesquicentennial Christmas Celebration, Moravian Sunday Schools, Bethlehem, PA, ca. 1891

H. B. Eggert, Sesquicentennial Christmas Celebration, Moravian Sunday Schools, Bethlehem, PA. ca. 1891, PhotColl Pa 704,Visual Materials, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA. Digital image courtesy of the Moravian archives, Bethlehem, PA.

H.D. was brought up in the Moravian Church. The Moravians were a Protestant sect that claimed an older lineage. In the mid-eighteenth century, they founded H.D.’s hometown, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. H.D.’s grandfather was an important figure in the community, who died when the future poet was six. The description of the funeral in the Central Moravian Church’s record book shows that his funeral was well-attended, with many Moravian dignitaries returning to Bethlehem to pay their respects. The service included hymns such as ‘Jesus Lord of life and Glory’, ‘How Bright these glorious spirits shine’, ‘Forever with the Lord’, ‘Asleep in Jesus’, and ‘When I shall gain permission’, which were taken from The Liturgy and Hymns of the American Province of the Unitas Fratrum, published in 1872.

The image above of a Moravian Sunday school celebration in 1891 is an important rejoinder to the way in which H.D.’s Moravian heritage is often depicted in the secondary literature. Drawing on her creative memoir The Gift, scholars often emphasise the radicality of the Moravians. The Gift stresses the importance of women’s creativity in the Moravian community. The initial organisation of the Moravian community in the eighteenth century sought to give women space to be creative through a communal approach to living and childrearing. The community might also have been inspired by the feminised Holy Spirit and androgenous understandings of Christ in Moravian theology. The image above recognises to some degree this creativity insofar as the Sunday school community is not simply gawping at the camera, but rather gathered around a huge putz or nativity scene constructed from hand-carved wooden figures and moss gathered from the surrounding woods (this tradition continues today).

There are nevertheless other factors at work. By the late nineteenth century, Moravian culture in Bethlehem reflected the social patterns evident across American society, including the veneration of men’s work, the undermining of women’s labour and the division of male and female spheres of activity. In the photograph, for instance, the male teachers are charged with the older boys, while their female counterparts attend to the girls and the younger children. This documentary evidence is important because it emphasises that H.D. could not merely turn to or recover her Moravian heritage. Instead, she remade it in ways that were personally meaningful to her and which helped her make sense of the world in which she lived. She made the Moravians new. The creative potential of lay religion is one of the central concerns of recent scholarship on lived religion; Modernism and Religion uses insights from this field to understand the religious dimension of H.D.’s poetry and prose, which represents an important document of lived religion in the age of modernism.