The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community

Book excerpt: Founded around 1700 by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists, the Halle Orphanage became the institutional headquarters of a universal seminar that still stands largely intact today. It was the base of an educational, charitable, and scientific community and consisted of an elite school for the sons of noblemen. Yet, its reputation as a Pietist enclave inhabited largely by young people has prevented the organisation from being taken seriously as a kind of scientific academy - even though, Kelly Joan Whitmer shows, this is precisely what it was. This book calls into question a long-standing tendency to view German Pietists as anti-science and anti-Enlightenment, arguing that these tendencies have drawn attention away from what was actually going on inside the orphanage.