Academic

Francis Daniel Pastorius Conference

By propertyprof

Yesterday's email brought the fantastic news that the University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies will be hosting a conference about Francis Daniel Pastorius in October 2009.  (We've spoken about him once before at the faculty lounge.)  This is great news not just because they have already lined up some fabulous speakers, but because Pastorius is one of the great unknown figures in early American history.  He was trained in law in Germany in the 1670s, then found religion and migrated to Pennsylvania in the early 1680s (just as Pennsylvania was being founded).  He co-authored an early petition against slavery and later treatises on medicine, law, and horticulture; he wrote volumes on poetry and promoting emigration to America.  And his magnum opus, his commonplace book Bee Hive runs to hundreds of pages.  It allows us to see he ideas on a range of ideas--much in there on pietist and Quaker thought, but much on other topics as well.  Over the generations--centuries, really--a number of people have written about him.  John Greenleaf Whitter wrote a poem about him before the Civil War, "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim," to celebrate Pastorius' antislavery work.  In the early twentieth century a professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania, Marion Dexter Learned, wrote an extensive biography, which reprinted excerpts from Pastorius' work.  There have been a few dissertations on him, one in 1950s and another in the 1980s, and a couple in the 1990s/2000s.

My first article after entering teaching was on Pastorius' legal treatise,  The Young Country Clerk's Collection (available at Hein On Line for subscribers).  There's a pretty neat story behind the Young Country Clerk's Collection: Pastorius crafted it out of several English legal manuals, along with forms he collected while in Pennsylvania.  It contains forms for wills, trusts, land transactions, sales contracts, criminal prosecutions, even arbitration--but nothing for civil suits.  The book illustrates how Pastorius' religious beliefs affected the forms he needed (and those he  did not want).   When put together with Pastorius' writings on law, justice, and magistrates, it gives a full picture of a world of peaceful and productive life--of opposition to haughty leaders and to quarelous business people, but also a well-regulated community.  His whole body of work testifies to the desire of those seventeenth century settlers to find a godly and peaceful community in America and to make a society on that model.  It's also testimony to how people sought in early America to make the world over--and how they succeeded.  It's a great, optimistic American story--though it is repleate with challenges, too.

What makes Pastorius particularly appealing as a figure for study is not just his concern for the community; his writings give us a rarely paralleled opportunity to study a large body of writing.  Plus, Pastorius gives us excellent citations on where many of his ideas in his commonplace book came from.  Hence, we can use Pastorius' writings to see the books in circulation in early Pennsylvania, along with how the ideas in those books appear and mix in the mind of one very thoughtful person. 

A lot has been written about the "history of the book" project of late.  It's a most exciting project, which seeks to understand how books condense ideas and promulgate them; how readers interpret ideas in a book and react to them.  This is core intellectual history work--and though I've now left Pastorius' Quaker legal thought and decamped for the South in the years leading into Civil War, where what I study now are the ideas of hierarchy and slavery, the methods used to trace ideas are pretty similar.  Pastorius' world was quite different from that of William and Mary President Thomas R. Dew and Georgia lawyer and treatise writer (and later Confederate General) Thomas R.R. Cobb.  But all three of those people mined others' writings for the insights of nature and history and then wrote important treatises, which cited the places they took their ideas from.  All allow us to bring some precision to the "history of the book" project.

The Call for Proposals is below.  I'm sure I'll be at that conference, though I'm still trying to decide if I have something new to say about Pastorius.  I will certainly be in the audience, though I'm tempted to join even more in the fun.  Still a part of my is tempted to leave my Pastorius work where it was when I decamped from the colonial era for the antebellum and progressive eras 'lo those many years ago.

CALL FOR PAPERS:

THE INDUSTRIOUS BEE: FRANCIS DANIEL PASTORIUS, HIS MANUSCRIPTS, AND HIS WORLD

McNeil Center for Early American Studies; University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Philadelphia, PA

CONFERENCE DATE: OCTOBER 23rd & 24th, 2009

Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651-1719) left behind a formidable body of writing that is only now beginning to be adequately studied but touches upon virtually every cultural, social, hilosophical, religious, and political question relevant to life in early America.  German-born cosmopolitan lawyer, farmer, schoolmaster, poet, and founder of Germantown, PA (1683), Pastorius' encyclopedic body of work ranges from the first antislavery tract in America to children's ABC primers, legal texts, poetry, gardening manuals, and a massive commonplace book, "The Beehive." Rich as they are in their own right, the manuscripts Pastorius kept also offer a fascinating vantage point from which to view the transmission of knowledge from Europe across the Atlantic to early America. In addition, Pastorius's methods of information storage, while informed by the humanist tradition, merit new scrutiny in the digital age.

In conjunction with the appearance of a new, web-based edition of his major work, "The Beehive," the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries invite proposals for papers that take advantage of the many opportunities for fresh and interdisciplinary work on a range of topics connecting Pastorius with, for instance, literary history, history of the book, intellectual history, legal history, horticulture, and pedagogy. The two-day conference will be held on the University of Pennsylvania campus and consist of keynote addresses, panels, and workshops. Confirmed speakers include Anthony Grafton, Peter Stallybrass, Patrick Erben, and Don Yoder. This conference will also feature an exhibition of rarely-seen Pastorius manuscripts.

Proposals of 300 words and a curriculum vitae should be sent by February 15th, 2009 to mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu or via U.S. mail to McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Attn.: Pastorius Conference, University of Pennsylvania, 3355 Woodland Walk, Philadelphia PA 19104-4531. Conference papers of approximately 25-30 pages in length will be due by September 1, 2009 and will be pre-circulated to all registrants. Some travel support will be available for conference participants, and conference papers may be considered for publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on December 10, 2008 (boomark / email).