People, Religion, Information Networks and Travel – The Dynamics of Migration in the Early Modern World

People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel: The Dynamics of Migration in the Early Modern World is a digital project that examines how the communication networks of European religious minorities in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries shaped migration flows – especially to British North America. Its goals are to visualize the complex transnational and ecumenical connections that arose in response to religious persecution and missionary work and to analyze how those links and the spread of information through them simultaneously provided access to new opportunities for religious refugees and new pools of immigrants for colonial projects. The project focuses on correspondence archives of Quakers, Mennonites and Pietists – all religious dissenters in the seventeenth century.

This collection of correspondence forms the digital repository for the project. The letters span from 1630 to 1730, are housed in five archives and libraries in four countries, and are primarily in English, Dutch and German. They are divided here first by religious group (Anabaptist, Pietist, and Quaker) and then by specific manuscript collections. For more information and to visit the PRINT portal, go to https://printmigrationnetwork.org/.

The project is a joint venture between the Department of History, the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, the Stadsarchief Amsterdam, the Archives of the Franckesche Stiftungen, Halle, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, The Library of the Society of Friends, and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. The project has received support from the National Historic and Public Records Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Omohundro Institute Lapidus Initiative Fellowship for Digital Collections and the College of Arts and Humanities.