Enlightenment Underground

Radical Germany, 1680-1720

Martin Mulsow, H. C. Erik Midelfort

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813938165
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund": full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website.

Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books.

Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected.

NOTES

When the notes refer to manuscript sources, they employ the abbreviations for archives and manuscript collections as designated under “Manuscript Sources” in the bibliography. Primary sources are cited (generally works published before 1800), with the date of publication in addition to the abbreviated title so that the full title can be found in the bibliography. Secondary sources are cited in the notes by referring only to the author and a shortened title.

Abbreviations

ADB Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 56 vols. Leipzig, 1876–1912.

CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 201 vols. Turnhout, Belgium, 1953–present.

DBA Deutsches Biographisches Archiv, ed. Bernhard Fabian and Willy Gorzny. Munich, 1992–present. Microfiche archive combining contents of 254 important biographical dictionaries covering Germany to the early nineeenth century.

DBL Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 3d ed., ed. Svend Cedergreen Bech, 16 vols. Copenhagen, 1979–84.

NDB Neue Deutsche Biographie, 25 vols. Berlin, 1953–present.

Zedler Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosse vollständige Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste, 68 vols. Halle, 1732–54.

Introduction

1. For orientation to the literature before 1981, see Gregory, “Il libertinismo della prima metà del seicento.” For recent research on atheism, see Wootton, “New Histories of Atheism”; Schröder, Ursprünge des Atheismus. A bibliography of current work and notes on conferences and publications is in the journal La lettre clandestine, founded by Olivier Bloch and Antony McKenna, two of the leading scholars in this area, and under the general direction of Alain Mothu. Since 1993, McKenna has been publishing editions of clandestine texts in the ambitious series Libre pensée et littérature clandestine. A few of the other important recent works are Bloch, Le matérialisme du XVIIIe siècle; Canziani, Filosofia e religione nella letteratura clandestine; Benítez, La face cachée; McKenna and Mothu, La philosophie clandestine. For the late eighteenth century, the works of Robert Darnton have made us familiar with the notion of a “literary underground”: see Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime; idem, Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. The great book by Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment, appeared only briefly before the original German version of this volume. Now one also needs to consult his two other books: Israel, Enlightenment Contested; idem, Democratic Enlightenment.

2. Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas. See also Spink, French Free-Thought.

3. Benítez offers a list of these manuscripts and their locations in La face cachée. Schröder provides an excellent survey of the most important works and of the current state of research in Ursprünge des Atheismus, 395–527.

4. See the works listed above in n. 1 by authors such as Bloch, McKenna, and Mothu.

5. Gregory, Theophrastus redivivus. Another pioneering effort is Canziani and Paganini, Theophrastus redivivus. I must also mention the works of Berti. These Italian investigations rest on flourishing research into libertinism, such as Ricuperati, L’esperienza civile e religiosa, and Bianchi, Tradizione libertina.

6. For English-language works, see esp. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, and the recent books by Jonathan Israel cited above in n. 1. But see also the works by Hunter and Wootton, as well as by Darnton. See also the studies by Popkin and Champion. For Dutch research, see esp. Bunge and Klever, Disguised and Overt Spinozism around 1700, as well as the journal Lias. For Spanish research, see the books by Benítez and Socas.

7. Two reprint series published by Frommann-Holzboog Verlag have taken the lead in rediscovering and republishing German clandestine authors. The first series is Philosophische Clandestina der deutschen Aufklärung, founded by Martin Pott and continued by Winfried Schröder. So far, it includes works by Theodor Ludwig Lau, Friedrich Wilhelm Stosch, Gabriel Wagner, Matthias Knutzen, and Johann Joachim Müller: see Mulsow, “Clandestine Literatur und deutsche Frühaufklärung.” The second series is Freidenker der europäischen Aufklärung, which now includes works by Johann Georg Wachter, Balthasar Bekker, and Georg Schade. Research on clandestine works that originated in the Berlin Huguenot Refuge has been centered in the University of Potsdam, especially in the work of Martin Fontius and Jens Häseler. From the days of the old German Democratic Republic, Stiehler’s Materialisten der Leibniz-Zeit is still useful as a collection and translation of texts by Stosch, Lau, Wagner, and Bucher. See also idem, Beiträge zur Geschichte des vormarxistischen Materialismus. For an introduction to the German radical Enlightenment, see Pott, “Radikale Aufklärung.” The older work by Wild is now somewhat out of date: Wild, “Freidenker in Deutschland.”

8. Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne (1935); idem, The Crisis of the European Mind. On its current relevance, see Jacob, “Hazard Revisited.”

9. Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 10.

10. See, e.g., the critique in Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment, introduction; Vernière, “Peut-on parler d’une crise de la conscience européenne?”

11. One of the pioneers of this sort of research is Dibon, “Communication in the Respublica literaria.” See also Bots and Waquet, Commercium litterarium. For Germany, see Bödeker, “Aufklärung als Kommunikationsprozeß.” Gierl builds on that work in

Pietismus und Aufklärung. Goldgar has studied the history of communication as the history of strategies for dealing with everyday scholarly life and scholarly conflicts: see Goldgar, Impolite Learning. See also Todesco, Lector scepticus. Scholars have often found inspiration in Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, but Habermas dated the origins of the public sphere rather later.

12. Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 7.

13. See Burke, “A ...