Educating the Protestant International : the influence of Halle Pietism in eighteenth-century charity education.

Abstract

Scholars have accepted the general influence of August Hermann Francke and Halle Pietism among English-speaking Protestant groups in the eighteenth century. One of the institutional byproducts of Francke’s influence was the number of charity schools and orphanages that claimed to be imitating his famous orphan house in Halle. This study will assess the extent to which claimants succeeded or failed in following the Halle model. The examples studied here do not capture the entire geographical extent of the influence of Halle Pietism, as they are limited to the personal and institutional networks mediated through the British Empire that developed after the Glorious Revolution. Previous studies have confined analyses of these imitations of Halle to their own settings without global comparison. This study also seeks to continue the recent global turn within studies of international Protestantism by including the cooperative Protestant activity in India within its scope.