Overcoming Objections to Print: The Moravian Periodical Accounts and the Pressure of Publishing in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Jensz, Felicity

Abstract

From the eighteenth century dedicated missionary periodicals were published by every major Protestant missionary society as an important means of informing a broad public about work amongst non-Christians throughout the colonial world. One of the very first missionary specific periodicals, the Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren, Established Among the Heathen, was printed in London by the English Moravian Church's "Brethren's Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel among the Heathen" (SFG) from 1790. The idea to publish the Periodical Accounts had, however, been raised some twenty years earlier. The article examines how the English Moravian Church, as part of a larger transnational church with its headquarters in Germany, was able to devise a publication which would be broadly acceptable to the church's German administrative body, yet specific enough to reflect the norms and interests of a local English audience, and in doing so, to establish the new genre of missionary periodicals within England.