Enlightenment's Reformation: The Protestant Idea of Freedom in Germany, 1700-1830

FAIN: FB-54913-10

Michael O'Neill Printy
Yale University (New Haven, CT 06510-1703)

I am seeking an NEH grant to support the writing of a book entitled Enlightenment's Reformation: The Protestant Idea of Freedom in Germany, 1700-1830. The book will show how and why eighteenth-century German thinkers saw the need to explicitly tie their project for intellectual and moral renewal to a specific story about the place of the Reformation in the genealogy of Enlightened reason and modern freedom. The conceptual linkage of the Reformation with modern freedom has an extensive history. My book will deal with this diffusion of ideas and sources by structuring its account around narratives and arguments about the Reformation's meaning at four chronological stages. The book will discuss how eighteenth-century Protestant thinkers appropriated narratives and discourses about the Reformation motivated by Enlightenment imperatives. In so doing, they transformed the meaning of the Reformation from a story of salvation to a story of freedom.

Associated Products

The Determination of Man: Johann Joachim Spalding and the Protestant Enlightenment (Article)
Title: The Determination of Man: Johann Joachim Spalding and the Protestant Enlightenment
Author: Michael Printy
Abstract: This article uses Johan Joachim Spalding's Bestimmung des Menschen (1748) to explore the transformation of German Protestantism in the second half of the eighteenth century. The text was at once a philosophical and religious meditation about the senses, the spirit, the nature of creation, and the immortality of the soul. In unleashing a set of discussions about the purpose of "man" that went far beyond his apologetical and devotional intention, Spalding laid the groundwork for the culture of modern German Protestantism, and also introduced a rivalry between theology and philosophy that was one of its constitutive and abiding features
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_the_history_of_ideas/v074/74.2.printy.html
Secondary URL: http://works.bepress.com/michael_printy/
Secondary URL Description: Copy of this article can be downloaded from my institutional repository.
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Journal of the History of Ideas

Protestantism and Progress in the Year XII: Charles Villers' Essay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther's Reformation (1804) (Article)
Title: Protestantism and Progress in the Year XII: Charles Villers' Essay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther's Reformation (1804)
Author: Michael Printy
Abstract: This article examines Charles Villers's Essay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther's Reformation (1804) in its intellectual and historical context. Exiled from France after 1792, Villers intervened in important French and German debates about the relationship of religion, history, and philosophy. The article shows how he took up a German Protestant discussion on the meaning of the Reformation that had been underway from the 1770s through the end of the century, including efforts by Kantians to seize the mantle of Protestantism for themselves. Villers's essay capitalized on a broad interest in the question of Protestantism and its meaning for modern freedom around 1800. Revisiting the formation of the narrative of Protestantism and progress reveals that it was not a logical progression from Protestant theology or religion but rather part of a specific ideological and social struggle in the wake of the French Revolution and the collapse of the Old Regime.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1479244312000054
Primary URL Description: Journal's website; subscription only
Secondary URL: http://works.bepress.com/michael_printy/3
Secondary URL Description: Copy of article available at institutional repository
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Modern Intellectual History

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