Francis Daniel Pastorius had many vocations: lawyer, statesman, geographer, master of eight to ten languages, theologian, teacher, historian, poet. One of the most learned people in Colonial America, he wrote constantly and left a rich and diversified literary legacy, much of it in German, still untranslated and unpublished.

Pastorius was born in 1651 in Sommerhausen, Franconia, Germany, where his father, Melchior Adam Pastorius, was a prosperous city official. Francis Daniel's mother was Magdalena Dietz, Melchior Adam Pastorius's first wife. In 1676 Pastorius completed seven years of university study (at a variety of universities) with a degree in law from the university at Altdorf. He practiced law briefly in Windheim but soon moved to Frankfort-au-Main, where he met Jacob Spener, the founder of Pietism. Pastorius's father had left Roman Catholicism for Lutheranism, and the son moved even further away from Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Even before his acquaintance with pietists and Quakers...