In recent years, historians have rediscovered the religious dimensions of the Enlightenment. This volume offers a thorough reappraisal of the so-called "Catholic Enlightenment" as a transnational Enlightenment movement. This Catholic Enlightenment was at once ultramontane and conciliarist, sometimes moderate but often surprisingly radical, with participants active throughout Europe in universities, seminaries, salons, and the periodical press. In Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History, the contributors, primarily European scholars, provide intellectual biographies of twenty Catholic Enlightenment figures across eighteenth-century Europe, many of them little known in English-language scholarship on the Enlightenment and pre-revolutionary eras. These figures represent not only familiar French intellectuals of the Catholic Enlightenment but also Iberian, Italian, English, Polish, and German thinkers. The essays focus on the intellectual and cultural factors influencing the lives and works of their subjects, revealing the often global networks of intellectual sociability and reading that united them both to the Catholic Enlightenment and to eighteenth-century policies and projects. The volume, whose purpose is to advance the understanding of a transnational "Catholic Enlightenment," will be a reliable reference for historians, theologians, and scholars working in religious studies.
"This is a compelling collection on an important subject. Its transnational and biographical approach helps one to see eighteenth-century Catholicism and the Enlightenment itself in fresh and interesting ways." -Darrin M. McMahon, Florida State University
Show moreIn recent years, historians have rediscovered the religious dimensions of the Enlightenment. This volume offers a thorough reappraisal of the so-called "Catholic Enlightenment" as a transnational Enlightenment movement. This Catholic Enlightenment was at once ultramontane and conciliarist, sometimes moderate but often surprisingly radical, with participants active throughout Europe in universities, seminaries, salons, and the periodical press. In Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History, the contributors, primarily European scholars, provide intellectual biographies of twenty Catholic Enlightenment figures across eighteenth-century Europe, many of them little known in English-language scholarship on the Enlightenment and pre-revolutionary eras. These figures represent not only familiar French intellectuals of the Catholic Enlightenment but also Iberian, Italian, English, Polish, and German thinkers. The essays focus on the intellectual and cultural factors influencing the lives and works of their subjects, revealing the often global networks of intellectual sociability and reading that united them both to the Catholic Enlightenment and to eighteenth-century policies and projects. The volume, whose purpose is to advance the understanding of a transnational "Catholic Enlightenment," will be a reliable reference for historians, theologians, and scholars working in religious studies.
"This is a compelling collection on an important subject. Its transnational and biographical approach helps one to see eighteenth-century Catholicism and the Enlightenment itself in fresh and interesting ways." -Darrin M. McMahon, Florida State University
Show moreJeffrey D. Burson is assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University.
“What one gleans from a reading of the volume as a whole is how
very many ways of being Enlightened there were, and how at least
some Catholic thinkers reconciled within their life spans…an
Enlightened approach to knowledge and traditional Catholicism.
[The] introduction by Jeffrey D. Burson . . . should be required
reading for anyone interested in the Enlightenment as a whole or
its many aspects.” —H-Net Reviews
“Study of the “Catholic Enlightenment” flourishes as never before.
. . . Charging at the gallop are Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L.
Lehner. . . . Taken as a whole this welcome book will stimulate
further discussions of a subject that no serious dix-huitiémiste,
ecclesiastical or otherwise, can afford to ignore.” —Journal of
Jesuit Studies
“This book argues for a robust, frequently positive, often complex,
relationship between Roman Catholicism and Enlightenment. It does
so through a series of essays on individual figures, lay and
ordained, male and female, from almost all parts of Europe that had
a significant Roman Catholic presence, illustrating many aspects of
Enlightenment culture, thought and politics. . . . This is a
landmark book and will form an important basis for future work on
Roman Catholicism’s relationship with, and contributions to, the
European Enlightenment.” —The Journal of Ecclesiastical History
“The editors intend this book to introduce the subject and to
provoke further research. The biographical organization helps
achieve that; and each essay answers just enough questions, and
leaves just enough hanging, to encourage working through the full
bibliographies concluding each one. Most of these chapters were
commissioned for this volume, and some of this research appears in
English for the first time. Several of these chapters could easily
be used in a class on the Enlightenment—and should be.” —Fides et
Historia
“This collection of brief biographies by European and American
scholars challenges the misconception, both lay and scholarly, that
the Enlightenment was uniformly secular and anticlerical by
exploring the lives and works of twenty men and one woman who
embraced aspects of Enlightenment science and philosophy in a
Catholic context. Organized into nine parts based on nationality,
the subjects span the breadth of Europe from the British Isles to
Poland, illustrating the complexity of Catholic attitudes toward
liberal currents in eighteenth-century thought.” —Catholic Library
World
“It has only been possible to draw attention to some of the riches
contained in this stimulating volume. All the works cited are set
in their social, cultural, and intellectual contexts. The
transnational approach helps to set 18th-century Catholicism and
the Enlightenment in a new perspective and to draw attention to
some thinkers who are not well known in the English-speaking world.
There are comprehensive bibliographies on all the authors treated
in the volume. This book will be an invaluable source of reference
for philosophers, theologians, historians, and students of European
literature.” —Irish Theological Quarterly
“Overall, these articles cast light on the attempts of some
Catholics to engage with the issues of their day, and also address
the opposition to these lines of thought by Catholic
contemporaries.” —Choice
“But the book’s great contribution is that it supplies
English-language accounts of some of the most significant Catholic
writings of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries from many
European countries, not only France, Italy, and Germany but also
Spain, Austria, Poland, and Scotland. In each case a bibliography
is also supplied. No other book conveys so well the pan-European
nature of Catholic discussion, or its range and depth. . . . The
editors deserve congratulation for having ranged so widely and for
having insisted on publishing short accounts of works by many
authors, so that their variety and geographical range can be
appreciated.” —The Catholic Historical Review
"The nature of the interaction between established religion and
Europe's Enlightenment remains deeply problematical. This notably
well-planned collection of studies of well-known and less familiar
figures brings the Catholic Enlightenment squarely into focus.
Nuanced, informative, and wide-ranging, it provides the best
introduction currently available to a central topic in
eighteenth-century European history." —Hamish Scott, University of
Glasgow
"An undoubted landmark in Enlightenment studies, this is certainly
the best volume that we have in English on the ‘Catholic
Enlightenment.'" —Jonathan I. Israel, Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
