The Ephrata Codex is a 972-page illuminated music manuscript that was created at the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania in 1746. It considered to be an “American Treasure,” and it is held in the United States Library of Congress. It includes the first original music theory treatise written in America, and it contains evidence of the earliest known women composers in what is today the United States.
This website is dedicated to research on the Ephrata Codex and its related sources. We hope that you marvel, as we do, at this extraordinary document, which brings a deeper understanding to American history.
To view the complete Ephrata Codex at the Library of Congress, click here.
Our Research Team
Jeff Bach
Jeff Bach is the leading scholar on the texts and theology of the Ephrata Cloister. Since his undergraduate major in German and year in Germany during college, Bach has continued to study and translate German texts related to Pietist religious groups of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. His doctoral studies in Religion at Duke University (1997) focused on Ephrata’s religious and esoteric texts, along with writings from other Pietist groups. He taught courses related to these groups at Bethany Theological Seminary (Richmond, Indiana) from 1994 to 2007. Bach retired in August 2020 from the Directorship of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania (since 2007) in order to devote more time to translation and writing. He frequently serves as a consultant to the Historic Ephrata Cloister, the current museum site in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. In addition to his monograph on Ephrata, Bach was co-translator of a volume of texts by the seventeenth century mystic, Jacob Böhme (2010). Recently he has published articles on Ephrata’s medical and alchemical traditions (“Heilung und Medizin,” 2016), Ephrata’s transatlantic context (“Ephrata Community,” 2016), and the mysticism of Jacob Böhme (2019). He presented a lecture, “Harmony of the Angels,” about Ephrata’s symbolic art and hymn texts, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for the dedication of their remodeled exhibit space. He has worked continuously with Ephrata texts since 1990.
Christopher Herbert
Christopher Herbert is the foremost expert on the music of the Ephrata Cloister. Herbert’s dissertation was the first published work to discuss Ephrata music in over two decades. He is the first person since the eighteenth century to view (and photograph) all extant Ephrata music manuscripts, and as a result, he developed a descriptive catalog for the oeuvre. He continues to research and publish on this subject (2019, 2020). Since commencing his research, Herbert has presented on Ephrata music at the American Choral Directors Association, Columbia University, Communal Studies Association, Elizabethtown College, The Historic Ephrata Cloister, Pennsylvania State Library, William Paterson University, and Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. Herbert is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at William Paterson University where he is head of the Voice program. In addition to his academic career, Herbert is a classical singer in frequent demand in both opera and concert stages. He was also the baritone in the GRAMMY-nominated vocal ensemble New York Polyphony for ten years. In November 2020, Herbert released a critically acclaimed album of his Ephrata transcriptions entitled Voices in the Wilderness on the Bright Shiny Things label. Voices in the Wilderness has received international attention, including a feature story for NPR’s Morning Edition, and glowing reviews from WQXR and theartsdesk.com (UK), which hailed the album as a “quietly revelatory act of musical archaeology.”