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Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe. Eds. Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2013. 280 pp. £60.00. ISBN 978–1–57113–561–2, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 50, Issue 4, October 2014, Page 509, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqu057
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Extract
This collection of essays examines ‘the personal, political, and aesthetic constructions of religious agency’ in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German cultural history (1). The overarching argument of the collection is that ‘the relationship between religion, reason, and culture’ in the period was ‘much more variegated’ than is often recognized by the ‘traditional narrative’ of widespread and unproblematic movement away from ‘the yoke of orthodox beliefs’ during the Enlightenment (11, 2). Drawing on a range of contemporary and historical sources, the editors, in their introduction, interrogate the extent to which the Enlightenment can properly be considered a largely secular movement at all: they argue that religion played a ‘foundational’ role in many key areas of inquiry most often associated with Enlightenment secularism, notably including the new constructions of subjectivity which would be taken up and developed during the Romantic period. The collection itself is divided into three parts, with essays following up these and other ideas in the work of Wieland, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Kleist, Holderlin, Leibniz and Spinoza, and the early legacy of these writers. The ‘traditional narrative’ of Enlightenment secularism which the editors take as their point of departure is arguably now something of a straw man, but the volume quickly moves beyond this and is undoubtedly illuminating on the various mediations and modulations of religion in mainstream eighteenth-century and Romantic-period German thought.
