Season 3 of Cloister Talk will begin on Monday, May 3, 2021, and will feature ten brand-new episodes that expand on themes and concepts explored in The Word in the Wilderness: Popular Piety and the Manuscript Arts in Early Pennsylvania, published by the Pennsylvania State University Press in 2020. This season of Cloister Talk is being launched in anticipation of the release of an affordable, paperback version of The Word in the Wilderness during summer, 2021.  Season 3 offers some exciting, and different, features for fans of the first two seasons of Cloister Talk.  Listen to the trailer to learn more.

Writing The Word in the Wilderness: Popular Piety and the Manuscript Arts in Early Pennsylvania, especially sharing the book’s ideas with audiences from across Pennsylvania and around the world, has truly been a journey undertaken in community.  At the conclusion of Season 2 of Cloister Talk: The Pennsylvania German Material Texts Podcast, it’s time to sit back, relax, and reflect on the book, the primary sources that made its analysis possible, and what The Word in the Wilderness and Pennsylvania German illuminated manuscripts have to teach us today.  Make a hot cup of tea and settle in for a fascinating discussion!  This final installment of Season 2 features personal reflections on the process of writing the book, and the fascinating world of historical museums and special collections libraries.

A key topic addressed in The Word in the Wilderness: Popular Piety and the Manuscript Arts in Early Pennsylvania is how a deeper understanding of the spiritual underpinnings of the Pennsylvania German manuscript arts can add nuance to our interpretation of early American religious and cultural life.  This episode of Cloister Talk explores that issue in greater depth, using Samuel Pennypacker’s book Pennsylvania in American History and intellectual historian Perry Miller’s famous work Errand Into the Wilderness as case studies for our analysis.

The famous Quaker Fireside Poet John Greenleaf Whittier had a special passion for Pennsylvania history, which he expressed in his famous poem “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim.”  Learn about Whittier’s interest in Pennsylvania religious heritage, his interpretation of the famous Pennsylvania settler Francis Daniel Pastorius, and what Whittier’s nineteenth-century poem reveals about the collective memory of the United States.

The history of material texts naturally intersects with the history of language—and linguistic theory.  Drawing on fascinating artifacts held at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, this episode of Cloister Talk offers useful transatlantic intellectual-historical context for the place of German language (spoken, written, and printed) in the early-modern European world.

Pennsylvania Germans figured prominently in a transatlantic world of copying and exchanging artistic, devotional texts.  This episode of Cloister Talk examines intricate and remarkable artifacts of this culture of copying, drawing on resources from the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Winterthur, Delaware.

Religious rituals and the commemoration of life events found rich expression in Pennsylvania German print and manuscript culture, especially on documents known as birth and baptismal certificates. This episode of Cloister Talk offers a detailed analysis of the certificate genre and considers how it connects to other Pennsylvania German material texts.

​Music has always figured prominently in Pennsylvania German religious culture, making it unsurprising that the musical and calligraphic arts intersected in potent ways during the Long Era of Manuscripts.  In this episode of Cloister Talk, take a journey into the rich musical heritage of German Protestantism and its expressions in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania German manuscript penmanship samples are some of the most engaging, text-rich, and religiously-significant devotional documents created during the Long Era of Manuscripts in early Pennsylvania.  This episode offers an in-depth introduction to the manuscript genre.

Pennsylvania German religious culture existed within a vast, complex, fluid, and interconnected world of German-Protestant spirituality and text exchange.  Perhaps no artifact better exemplifies this heritage than a Pennsylvania-printed Bible held at the Free Library of Philadelphia that was once captured by pirates on its voyage to Europe!  Listen to this remarkable story—and learn what it has to teach us about early American religion and history of the book.