Zinzendorf's Blut-und-Wunden theology addressed the wounds of Christ as the direct object of devotion — not a metaphor for atonement but a place to be, and specifically the pierced side as a shelter. In the period the Moravians themselves call the Sifting Time, roughly 1743 to 1750 and centred on the Herrnhaag community, this produced hymns and liturgies of an extravagance that embarrassed the next generation: the side wound addressed as a birthplace and a bed, believers described as little bees and blood-worms in it, birthday celebrations for the wound. Zinzendorf himself ended it, Herrnhaag was closed, and a great deal of the material was destroyed or suppressed. Modern Moravian scholarship, particularly through the Bethlehem and Herrnhut archives, has published and analysed the texts rather than buried them, and the sexual and bodily frankness of the period is now a substantial field of study.