Exciting Collaborative Digital Project Launches, Including My New Essay “Cobbler of the Cosmos”

Ludwig Denig, emblem book, 1784. Accession no. 2020.0011. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard A. Schwartz. 2020.0011. Winterthur Museum.

The Winterthur Museum, Garden, & Library and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media have unveiled an exciting new collaborative digital humanities project, titled The Denig Manuscript, which explores the fascinating history of a rare and spectacular artifact of Pennsylvania’s German Pietistic heritage. I am exceedingly honored to have an essay featured in the project. Titled “Ludwig Denig, Cobbler of the Cosmos: Penmanship, Calligraphy, and Pietistic Spirituality in Early Lancaster, Pennsylvania,” the essay takes readers on a voyage through time, space, and religious conviction, to view the world through the pious lens of an early Pennsylvanian. Check out the essay here:

https://denigmanuscript.org/essays/scholarship/ludwig-denig-cobbler-of-the-cosmos-penmanship-calligraphy-and-pietistic-spirituality-in-early-lancaster-pennsylvania/  

Ludwig Denig’s manuscript emblem book is an artifact of American religious history that may seem as mysterious as it is beautiful.  Why would a prosperous craftsman devote hours of his life and labor to creation of a devotional manuscript, in a town that abounded with printed books for sale?  And isn’t the making of illuminated manuscripts a task that occupied monks during the European Middle Ages--not a pastime for innovative craftsmen in an American frontier town on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution?  The seeming oddity of Denig’s enterprise to our modern eyes makes the manuscript he created ripe for analysis as an artifact of the religious, literary, intellectual, and material history of the early modern Atlantic world.

This essay serves as a beginner’s introduction for users of the Denig manuscript website, providing tips for how to engage with a Pennsylvania German manuscript for the first time.  It offers useful insights on what to look for when viewing Denig’s document. Drawing on theories and methods developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée Sauvage (1962), Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) and Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms (1976), Ludwig Denig, Cobbler of the Cosmos explores why, and how, a Pennsylvania German-Protestant craftsman embraced manuscript art as a tool for spiritual exploration—and liberation—at the end of the eighteenth century.  In an effort to unlock the textual and visual inspirations for his distinctive cosmology, the essay isolates and analyzes key elements of the material and aesthetic qualities of Denig’s manuscript, ranging from the document’s gothic scripts to the devotional images that fill the book’s pages, situating the artifact within the wider world of devotional manuscript production among eighteenth-century Pennsylvania Germans.  It argues that Denig inhabited a transatlantic German-Protestant culture in which manuscripts nourished individual and collective spiritual expression. 
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I am honored to see my work featured alongside the contributions of distinguished scholars, and to have partnered with Winterthur (forever my scholarly home!) and other organizations to see this project to fruition. Check out the site today!