Funded Projects Query Form
One match

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.