The Word in the Wilderness Official Study Guide Now Available Online: Offers In-depth Opportunities for Guided Reading and Exploration

The Word in the Wilderness Official Study Guide is now available for free PDF download at https://www.wordinwilderness.com/clubs.html. 

The colorful, engaging, 20-page document is a useful resource for individuals or groups reading The Word in the Wilderness: Popular Piety and the Manuscript Arts in Early Pennsylvania to interact more deeply with the content of the book.  Study guide users will follow up on key themes covered in the volume, via hyperlinks to further resources including museum and library online collection databases as well as electronic books and articles.

The study guide offers enhanced content organized around each of the book’s principle sections.  Each study guide section includes questions for private study, group discussion questions, and links to further web resources to continue exploring the main topics under consideration, including episodes of Cloister Talk: The Pennsylvania German Material Texts Podcast that offer further insight into particularly relevant themes.  Readers who are engaging with The Word in the Wilderness on their own will find the study guide a useful companion.  The guide will prove especially useful for book clubs and discussion circles reading the book who wish to lend some structure to their group conversations. 

The Word in the Wilderness was written as an engaging and approachable introduction to the devotional and textual practices of the Pennsylvania Germans, but the study addresses issues in early American religious, cultural, and intellectual history that at times may seem challenging in their complexity and multiple facets.  The study guide helps direct readers toward the most salient and important points made in The Word in the Wilderness while deepening engagement with the book’s source material.

Two online, interactive PDF versions of the study guide are available: one optimized for viewing on a computer desktop, and one optimized for printing.  Both versions are available at https://www.wordinwilderness.com/clubs.html.  Start exploring the study guide today!