UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores a unique religious awakening among early modern Protestants whose primary feature was a revival of ascetic, monastic practices a century after the early Reformers condemned such practices. By the early seventeenth-century, a widespread dissatisfaction can be discerned among many awakened Protestants at the suppression of the monastic life and a new interest in reintroducing ascetic practices like celibacy, poverty, and solitary withdrawal to Protestant devotion. The introduction and chapter one explain how the absence of monasticism as an institutionally sanctioned means to express intensified holiness posed a problem to many Protestants. Large numbers of dissenters fled the mainstream Protestant religions—along with what they viewed as an increasingly materialistic, urbanized world—to seek new ways to experience God through lives of seclusion and ascetic self-deprival. In the following chapters, I show how this ascetic impulse drove the formation of new religious communities, transatlantic migration, and gave birth to new attitudes and practices toward sexuality and gender among Protestants. The study consists of four case studies, each examining a different non-conformist community that experimented with ascetic ritual and monasticism. Chapters two and three examine the prayer practices of two semi-monastic Protestant communities—the ‘Angelic Brethren’ led by the mystic Johann Gichtel and a circle of Quietists led by Charles Héctor Marquis de Marsay. These communities fused the ascetic, mystical teachings on self-renunciation and union with modern mystical traditions in creating their own withdrawn, mystical devotions in an attempt to separate themselves from the world and their own carnal wills. In chapter four, the familiar story of a Protestant cloister in North America, the Ephrata Cloister, is recast as a part of the broader ascetic revival in this dissertation. Particularly attention is given in this chapter to the prevalence of celibacy in Protestantism. The final chapter and conclusion examines the afterlife of ascetic theology and mysticism in the late enlightenment and romantic period which saw a fierce divide over the value and meaning of solitude. From northern Germany, Amsterdam, and across the Atlantic in colonial North America, these dissenters formed utopian communities that strove to keep their distance from civilization even as they engaged in the project of global European expansion, empire, and settlement.