In her 1772 memoir, Sarah Chapman relays an exciting tale of daring escape from her parent’s home in December 1752. She was seventeen, single, and determined to join the Moravian Church, a new group originating in eastern Saxony. Women like Sarah—usually young and single—saw in the Moravians an alternative to settled life. This article explores the place of the Moravian Church as a disruptive organization which built congregations of young people who separated themselves from home and family, often dramatically retold in spiritual memoirs. Their Hussite proto-Reformation influences, combined with the charismatic leadership of the Saxon Count Zinzendorf, provided space for diverse forms of female participation. Through tales of run-away women, I argue that studying Moravian women disrupts the traditional conception of church creation as predominantly male and instead reconceives the religious fracturing of eighteenth-century Protestantism as something intimately experienced by women, even those young and single.

中文翻译：

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依靠逃亡者

萨拉·查普曼 (Sarah Chapman) 在她 1772 年的回忆录中讲述了一个激动人心的故事，讲述了 1752 年 12 月她大胆逃离父母家的故事。当时她十七岁，单身，决心加入摩拉维亚教会，这是一个起源于萨克森州东部的新团体。像莎拉这样的女性——通常是年轻且单身——在摩拉维亚人中看到了安定生活之外的另一种选择。本文探讨了摩拉维亚教会作为一个破坏性组织的地位，该组织建立了由远离家庭和家人的年轻人组成的教会，这些教会经常在精神回忆录中戏剧性地重述。她们受到胡斯派原始宗教改革的影响，加上撒克逊伯爵亲岑多夫的魅力领导，为多种形式的女性参与提供了空间。通过逃亡女性的故事，我认为，研究摩拉维亚女性打破了教会创建以男性为主的传统观念，而是将十八世纪新教的宗教分裂重新视为女性（甚至是年轻单身女性）亲身经历的事情。