Abstract
The Reformation ran headlong into the Enlightenment between the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. The most radical byproducts of sixteenth-century Europe's religious reform movements settled in this colony hailed by Enlightenment thinkers as a beacon of toleration. Nothing probed the parameters of that toleration as pointedly as the celibate sect that established the Ephrata Cloister on the banks of Cocalico Creek. Leben und Wandel, the autobiography of Ezechiel Sangmeister, offers historians the most detailed perspective on the daily life and culture surrounding that community in Pennsylvania and flowing south down the Shenandoah.
