German Pietists challenged Enlightenment thinking in the eighteenth century by
[Editor's Note: September 20, 2010 marks the start of a new forum here on H-German with the publication of the introductory essay as well as the first of five solicited contributions. An additional essay will follow each day this week. We invite members to contribute to the discussion once all of the initial contributions have been posted. The editors would like to reiterate our thanks to all the contributors, especially the chief organizer, Mary Lindeman. Moreover, we would like to acknowledge their great patience and forebearance in the lengthy delay -- the fault of the editors, not the contributors -- in awaiting final publication of this project.] Show Introduction - H-German Forum on "New Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century History" This Forum showcases new approaches to, and introduces new historical research on, the German eighteenth century. But does "eighteenth-century Germany" as a field or an analytic concept even exist? Helmut Puff, in a feisty opening to his contribution on sexuality, casts doubts on the analytical or even heuristic validity of such. Certainly, no well-developed sense of /dix-huitièmisme/ exists among central European historians as a scholarly identity in the same way that historians of France or English literary scholars possess. The feeble representation of German historians in the membership and at the meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) testifies to how seldom even those working within the "long" eighteenth century (are there no short centuries?), say, from 1650-1815, have identified themselves principally as "scholars of the eighteenth century." For many years it was hard for those who did research within those chronological boundaries to find an intellectual home, let alone a job. When I entered the job market in 1980, few scholars in the United States worked on or wrote about the German eighteenth century with the possible exception of those who focused on Friedrich II and "the rise of Prussia." (German scholars had admittedly always given more attention to the period.) Even the /Aufklärung/ was not particularly well served. There were a good handful of major scholars in the field, of course, including Mack Walker, James Allen Vann, and, later, Anthony LaVopa (a student of Walker's), but the field was not, to say the least, heavily populated in comparison with the many scholars working on the twentieth century or the Reformation. I remember distinctly, and I am sure that Jamie Melton (here represented) will agree, that presenting one's credentials with a dissertation focusing mainly on the eighteenth century was a somewhat discouraging task. "But you can also teach the Third Reich, right?" Or, on the other side, "You'll do a course on the Reformation and Luther, won't you?" For early modern jobs, departments wanted principally (albeit not exclusively) Reformation scholars or the now-extinct animal, a "Ren/Ref" historian. Still, there were scholarly advantages to be reaped here as well: the field was pretty much "open." Then there was the additional problem of where did one present papers or go to network. At the time Sixteenth-Century Studies was more "sixteenth" than it has since become and still very much linked to Reformation history. The German Studies Association annual meeting might find room for an eighteenth-century panel (but there were few of those) and a stray eighteenth-century panelist might have found a home with other orphans (such as the truly disinherited scholars of the early nineteenth century) in a session titled "Varia." Fortunately, this situation has changed almost all out of recognition. While historians of the German eighteenth century still avoid ASECS, over the past few years the number of studies on the eighteenth century, or those that see the eighteenth century as crucial to telling the larger story of German history (such as Christopher Clark) is great and growing. The German Studies Association now presents a full and intellectually stimulating set of early modern panels (which are, in addition, often cross- or inter-disciplinary) in The following five contributions showcase relatively new methods and topics (comparative history, anthropological perspectives, queer studies and the like) as well as revisions in the writing of more "traditional" histories, such as the political history of Prussia. The topics treated here--on Germany and the Atlantic world, gender and sexualities, Prussia, religion, and race and colonialism--hardly reflect the true richness of work now being done and many important themes and historical interventions are not represented. Desiderata were sometimes left unfulfilled because it was not possible--at the time--to obtain a commitment from an appropriate scholar. There is also nothing here specifically on the Holy Roman Empire because a new volume of essays, The Holy Roman Empire, Reassessed (edited by Jason P. Coy, Benjamin Marschke, and David Sabean) is about to appear (Berghahn, 2010). Nor are there any contributions As the editor, or rather the compiler, of this Forum, I have not sought to impose any particular structure on the individual contributors, but rather left them alone to follow their own instincts and give, quite literally, their own "perspectives." The result has been, happily, a good deal of similarity in some ways, but with enough difference to reflect intellectual diversity. Each contribution is in part a survey of new work, in part authorial impression, and in part a "wish list" of things that still need to be accomplished. Thus, they combine, I believe, some of the virtues of a historiographic essay with less rigidly structured personal views. All the contributors integrate their own What may still be missing here is more sense of what, if anything, makes the eighteenth century unique and a valid period or historical concept worth preserving. Moreover, perhaps we all need to pay more attention to breaks, shifts, and ruptures within the eighteenth century; Puff, for instance, notices a "double fracture." Are there developments that split the eighteenth century, that perhaps make its first half better allocated to the "long" seventeenth century and its second half to a "long" nineteenth century? Or are there two eighteenth centuries, split somewhere, not necessarily in the middle? Or do, as I suspect is true, different subjects require different eighteenth-century periodizations? Finally, and despite the care with which both Jamie Melton and Vera Lind take to carry us out of German-speaking lands and even off the European continent, we still lack much work on how German experiences and events fit into broader European and world perspectives. Mary Lindeman, Forum Organizer
September 22, 2010 - New Perspectives on the History of Eighteenth-Century Prussia This initial essay points to several new perspectives and indicates some gaps in the history and historiography of eighteenth-century Prussia. Of course this contribution is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of the history of eighteenth-century Prussia, but merely a collection of my thoughts on the state of the field. As is often pointed out, no other state influenced the history of Germany as much as did Prussia. Moreover, the eighteenth-century is central to Prussian history and historiography, because this was the period when New Perspectives on Old Problems Over the last century analyses have wavered on whether the positives associated with Prussia and Germany's "special path" (Sonderweg) have outweighed the negatives, or vice versa. Unfortunately, most "new perspectives" on eighteenth-century Prussia have usually been swayed far more by current events and the political alignments of the historians involved than by new historical In the midst of all of this debate over Prussia's merits and demerits, what has been largely lacking has been much questioning (let alone primary research) of how accurately these supposed "Prussian" characteristics describe eighteenth-century Prussia. On the contrary, debate and polemic have inevitably led historians to over-simplification and hyperbole, and discouraged nuanced Interpretations of Frederick II and his reign have similarly been a long recurring theme in the history of eighteenth-century Prussia. More than any other figure, Frederick "the Great" epitomizes eighteenth-century "Prussian-ness," and judgments of both have followed the much the same pattern over the last century or more. Most recently Frederick has been the subject of two quite different books: Johannes Kunisch's comprehensive new biography of Frederick and Peter-Michael Hahn's historiographic work on subsequent eras' Despite these significant revisions, the Prussian "state" still dominates the history of eighteenth-century Prussia, even while it is (or should be) readily acknowledged to be a tremendously problematic term. The "state" is still usually portrayed, often unconsciously, as having agency and being separate from the rest of society; the "state" is typically described has having its own motivations and interests. Ironically, though the history of Prussia may have been the original subject of "state-building," it has now fallen behind the The periodization of eighteenth-century Prussian history remains much the same as ever, and the breaking points are almost invariably the successions of 1713, 1740, and 1786. Even the most recent social and cultural histories hold to this framework. Of course, the wildly differing personalities and policies of the eighteenth-century rulers of Prussia make these demarcations seem obvious, but New Perspectives on New Problems The Aufklärung, the German Enlightenment, has also recently been subject to closer study and serious revision. "Enlightened absolutism" may not quite be synonymous with "Enlightenment in Prussia," but it is virtually impossible to mention either enlightened absolutism or its poster child, Frederick II, without discussing the other. Like "Prussian-ness" and Frederick II, "enlightened absolutism" (aufgeklärter Absolutismus) in eighteenth-century Prussia has been compared to the "normative" western European phenomenon (the Pietism was intertwined with the development of "Prussian-ness" in the early eighteenth century just as enlightened absolutism was in the late eighteenth century, so it is virtually inconceivable to discuss either early eighteenth-century Prussia or Halle Pietism without referencing and considering the other. However, Pietism has received far less critical attention in the last several decades than has absolutism or the enlightenment. The foundational works of Carl Hinrichs and Klaus Deppermann, which appeared in the early 1960s, However, this dominance is a problem. Although eighteenth-century Prussian absolutism and the Enlightenment have been thoroughly questioned, vociferously debated, and ultimately fundamentally reassessed in the last several decades, there has been no similar questioning of Pietism. Moreover, while the relationship of religion to society and politics and culture has been deeply probed in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, relatively little such work has been done on seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Perspectives and Paths Not Yet Taken This situation may simply be a generational issue. Researchers now at the pinnacles of their careers came of age as scholars in the USA or BRD in the 1970s and 1980s, and working on Prussia then was not only politically and geographically difficult due to the location of the archives, but also regarded as passé. Based on anecdotal evidence, the current generation of historians, now coming of age as scholars, has turned its attention back to eighteenth-century Prussia and the newly accessible archives. We can hope for new perspectives. Benjamin Marschke, Humboldt State Notes
September 24, 2010 Until recently, the question of secularization loomed over most discussions of religion in eighteenth-century Germany. This was primarily a secularization of mind and society, but its roots were traced to the declining role of religion in justifications for political authority. The peace treaties of 1648 are rightly said to have put an end to the first era of confessional politics, with attention shifting to the solidification of governance and administration within boundaries set by the Peace of Westphalia. Rulers and magistrates No matter how tenaciously an implicit secularization narrative persists outside the walls of eighteenth-century German studies, it is no longer tenable. Recent work on religion in the period has challenged the pervasive "subtraction stories" (to use Charles Taylor's apt characterization of secularization narratives) that have hitherto dominated histories of eighteenth-century Germany, indeed of Europe as a whole.[1] In their place, historians are putting forth studies that pay closer attention to the ways in which religion in the eighteenth century underwent significant and even creative transformations. Religion can no longer be seen as an unchanging relic of earlier times destined to slowly fade away. This also means that we are more attuned to the continuing significance of religion well into the nineteenth century. While nineteenth-century religious history has by no means been ignored or slighted, by rethinking the vitality of eighteenth-century religious history, we are in a better position not only to understand the continuities between the two eras, but also to identify more precisely the changes. We do not need to dispense with the term secularization altogether, although its considerable baggage should be handled with care. Because the question of secularization is not bound to go away any time soon, historians might as well turn their efforts toward redeploying it. We might even be able to re-colonize the modernizing discourse from which it initially entered early modern studies. This is not to say that a one-sided obsession with the march of secularism has been replaced with an equally distorted emphasis on the religious origins of modernity. Rather, an earlier dichotomy has been set aside in favor of a fuller appreciation of the place of religion in social and intellectual history. It is also necessary to examine the ways in which "religion" can be found in a wide variety of discourses, practices, and institutions that constitute the other topics of this forum, from sexuality and science to politics and intellectual culture. This is not to say that "religion" is a master category in which all others are subsumed. But it does require us to recognize that many Germans in the period saw religion, in Moses Mendelssohn's terms, as one of the "pillars of social life," the rethinking of which constituted a vital part of a wide range of cultural and political activity.[3] Moreover, we should continually reflect on how exactly we are defining "religion," and be aware that the boundaries we assume to exist between the religious and the secular might have been drawn very differently in the period we study. The backdrop for much of the discussion of religion and modernity is the Weberian supposition behind a secularizing, modernizing narrative that sees Protestantism as the motor of modernity. Given the intense attention that the Weber thesis has received over the course of a century, it is surprising to find that reactions to it can still elicit strikingly new ideas and perspective. One of these is to be found in Peter Hersche's magisterial Muße und Verschwendung: Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter,[4] While much of Hersche's book is not about Germany, one central concern to German history is at the forefront of the book, namely the relationship of nation and confession. The rise of national cultures is also the story of the decline (or reconfiguration) of transnational confessional cultures in the early modern period. As for eighteenth-century Germany, Hersche makes the case that reform efforts in Catholic culture drew from three broad strands, all directed at reforming baroque Catholicism in its various guises. These strands Hersche's attempt to provide a comprehensive account of Catholic culture from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries implies that only later did national-confessional cultures assume more importance. For him, the cohesion and restrained classicism of the Gallican Church was the exception, not the rule. Scholarship in the last generation has done much to dismantle older narratives that projected forms of the nation back into history. The weakening hold of the secularization thesis has also enabled us to see how the nexus of confessional culture, the state, and ecclesiastical establishments in the Old Regime played a formative role in elaboration new ideas of the nation. For Germany, this evolution is particularly problematic given the official recognition of the three confessions in the Empire after 1648. My own work argues that certain German Catholic thinkers indeed tried to articulate a specific sense of the German Catholic church (nonetheless still in communion with Rome) as part of a process of conceptual separation from a broader early modern Catholic world. In my book, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism, I argue that German Catholic intellectuals rethought the church, envisioning a church that would solidify the link between religion, civilization and morality. While they sought autonomy from Rome, they also defended Catholicism from a rising narrative of Protestant progress. Their Catholic Enlightenment aimed for a middle position between popular baroque religious practices and the anti-clericalism and materialism emanating from other stains of the European Enlightenment. It would seem worth asking whether something similar was not at play among German Protestants, as they, too, A somewhat different act of perspective-shifting with regard to the question of religion and modernization is accomplished by Ulrike Gleixner, albeit in the much better-tilled field of Pietism. In her study of Pietism and the bourgeoisie in Württemberg, Gleixner asks whether "the bourgeois transformation from premodernity to modernity in fact can even be considered under the concept of secularization, or whether indeed this transformation for a portion of the bourgeoisie cannot be characterized as a process of re-Christianization."[9] She sees the pious movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries operating as a "parallel process" alongside secularization and dechristianization. "Religion is not a relict of tradition, but is constitutive of modernity. Pietism is the last great Protestant attempt to re-organize the totality of life under Christian claims."[10] While this insight is not entirely new, her work presents a wider perspective in its methods and sources. What differs is her recovery of the household and the role of the family and The subject of the formation of a Catholic bourgeois outlook was explored over a decade ago by Rudolf Schlögl. Although his book Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung [15] stakes its claims on the study of only three cities, his general point about the consequences of massive shift in "lay piety" away from the expressive devotionalism of baroque Catholicism strikes home.[16] Whereas Hersche focuses on the broad cultural shift away from baroque Catholicism along three different reforming fronts, Schlögl, employing techniques pioneered by the Annales school, aims to show how changes in piety can be traced though such things as reading habits and wills. This shift in piety--which we should not too quickly characterize as an abandonment of belief or even of Interestingly, as Shmuel Feiner has written, a similar process of differentiation within the intellectual and religious elite can be seen in the Haskalah. Although not a German movement per se, its core activities were in the German-speaking lands in the eighteenth century, even if the Jewish Enlightenment's cultural and intellectual sphere extended widely into Poland-Lithuania.[17] While the structure and dynamic of the Jewish Enlightenment obviously differed significantly from the process of Enlightenment within the Catholic church, Feiner argues that a group of (self-appointed) /maskilim/ consciously challenged the intellectual and educational monopoly of the rabbis. The reaction to their assertions of authority set the stages for the subsequent Jewish /Kulturkampf/ between While I have so far focused on developments with confessions, we cannot ignore that one of the defining features of German religious history under the Old Regime was its plurality, not only at the imperial level, but also, of course, within biconfessional cities. In an earlier work, Etienne François showed how an "invisible boundary" persisted in bi-confessional Augsburg, whereby Catholic and Lutheran individuals, while living in the same city, nonetheless drew sharp confessional and cultural boundaries around themselves.[18] In a recent essay, Duane Corpis has extended this type of analysis to argue that confessional authorities sought to monopolize urban space to maintain social and confessional difference, even while individuals could try to escape these strictures through conversion.[19] That conversion was as much a religious as a social strategy well into the eighteenth century reminds us that all was not rosy then. Dismantling the secularization thesis as a story of progress does not mean that just because the Westphalian treaties delegitimized religious justifications for territorial warfare in the Empire after 1648 religious conflict evaporated. Instead, we need to expand our horizons, and also re-examine older periodizations and moments of rupture. This sort of re-examination has been done on a European-wide scale by Benjamin Kaplan, who argues that toleration as a social practice long preceded its articulation as an Enlightenment-era policy and program (such as Joseph II's 1781 Edict of Toleration). He emphasizes that persecution and intolerance lasted well into the eighteenth century, if not longer in certain communities The discussion of toleration, the Enlightenment, and the secularization narrative brings us to intellectual history, where questions of religion have received prominent treatment of late. This is the focus of several recent books, including Jonathan Sheehan's The Enlightenment Bible and David Sorkin's The Religious Enlightenment. Sheehan conceives of secularization not "as the disappearance of religion" but instead as "its transformation and reconstruction."[23] His religious Enlightenment concentrates on practices and Sorkin's religious Enlightenment, on the other hand, is not a story of religion marginalizing itself, but of a transformation of faith itself. "Contrary to the secular narrative," Sorkin argues, "the Enlightenment was not only compatible with religious belief, but conducive to it. The Enlightenment made possible new iterations of faith. With the Enlightenment's advent, religion lost neither its place nor its authority in European society and culture."[24] Sorkin argues that religious Enlighteners across Europe "searched for a middle way of Renewed attention to religion in the eighteenth century reaches even to the most rarified regions of German intellectual history. In his ambitious Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany, Ian Hunter reconstructs an alternate history of the civil philosophy of Christian Thomasius and Samuel von Pufendorf, insisting that it not be dialectically subsumed into a later Kantian synthesis. Hunter argues that the confessional situation of post-Westphalian (Protestant) Germany led jurists to "desacralize" political thought and the law not, he insists, because they aimed to do away with religion entirely, but because they sought to segregate it to a private sphere in accordance with both the letter and the spirit of the Westpahlian treaties.[27] While some of Hunter's characterizations of religion and the religious wars fall a bit flat (relying on a somewhat outdated faith in the confessionalization thesis), his real point is to draw out the "neo-confessional character of rationalist political metaphysics" formalized by Immanuel Kant and his successors.[28] The specific ways in which later (Protestant) German philosophy purposively transgressed the legal constraints of theological polemic are taken up by Hunter's subsequent essay on Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone and Wöllner's 1788 Edict on Religion.[29] While some of Hunter's key philosophical interpretations have been challenged,[30] the prominence of his book nonetheless indicates the ways in which a newfound discovery of the vitality, diversity, and intensity of religious concerns in eighteenth-century Germany has made itself known in a variety of scholarly contexts. Given that recent scholarship on the eighteenth century shows the gradual decline of a grand secularization narrative, it is to be hoped that new vistas on the history of the era will be discovered. What these means for any possible overarching treatment of "religion" in eighteenth-century Germany is an open question. Given that religious conflict Michael Printy, Wesleyan University Notes [1]. For the phrase, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22. [2]. David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 117. [3]. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or, on Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Alan Arkush (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 33. [4]. Peter Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung. Europäische Gesellschaft und Kulture im Barockzeitalter 2 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 2006). The best account of German Catholic baroque culture and religion in English is Marc Forster, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). [5]. Hersche, Muße 1:27. [6]. Hersche, Muße 2: 952. Hersche dealt extensively with Jansenism in his Der Spätjansenismus in Österreich (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1977). [7]. The fruitfulness of such an approach is attested by J. G. A. Pocock's analysis of the "Arminian Enlightenment" in the larger Protestant world in Barbarism and Religion: Volume I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon 1737-1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 50-71. Along different lines, recent work by W. R. Ward shows the pan-European, even global, [8]. See for example Philip Gorski, "The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism," American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 5 (2000): 1428-1468. [9]. Ulrike Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum. Eine historische Anthropologie der Frömmigkeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2005), 13. [10]. Gleixner, 393. "The last" may be somewhat overstated. [11]. Ibid., 397. [12]. Ibid., 399. [13]. Ibid., 400. [14]. Ibid., 405. [15]. Rudolf Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung: Die Katholische Stadt--Köln, Aachen, Münster--1700-1840 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995). [16]. I explore the problem of the "search for a bourgeois Catholicism" in Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125-143. [17]. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). See also David Sorkin's chapter on Mendelssohn in The Religious Enlightenment. [18]. Etienne François, Die Unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648-1806 (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1991). [19]. Duane J. Corpis, "Space and urban religious life in Augsburg, 1648-1750," in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, eds., Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 302-325. [20]. See Mack Walker, The Salzburg Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). [21]. W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). [22]. Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 357-358. [23]. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), xi. [24]. Sorkin, 3. [25]. Ibid., 11. [26]. Ibid., 21. [27]. Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xi. Along similar, if much more modest, lines, Thomas Ahnert emphasizes Thomasius's religious commitments in Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment. Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006.) [28]. Hunter, Rival Enlightenments, 373. [29]. Ian Hunter, "Kant's Religion and Prussian Religious Policy," Modern Intellectual History 2, no. 1 (2005), 1-27. [30]. For example, by George di Giovanni, Freedom and Religion in Kant and his Immediate Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). What contribution was made by the German pietists who challenged the Enlightenment?What contribution was made by the German Pietists who challenged the Enlightenment? They informed the overriding philosophy of the Great Awakening. While the urban electorate broadened and British authority weakened in the 1730s and 1740s, what urban problem persisted?
What was the greatest achievement of eighteenth century medical science?The eradication of smallpox stands as one of the greatest achievements of medical science.
Why did the concept of marriage as partnership apply to so many families in the late 17th century?Why did the concept of marriage as partnership apply to so many families in the late 17th century? Wives and husbands shared religious faith.
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