Fearless Faith

We all have seen it. We just didn’t know it had a name. “It” is the angular gothic-styled Germanic lettering called “fraktur” that is often discoverable on bookplates, manuscripts, handbills and similar artifacts from the mid to late 1700s and early 1800s. One of the earliest stylistic schools of fraktur ascended from the Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, (1745-1755). Ephrata was known, in part, as one of the few places in Colonial America where women could exercise their own authority. A number of women of the cloister, who fled colonial hardships for the relative calm and s...