Hallesche Beiträge zur Europäischen Aufklärung

Die vor-autonome und noch nicht auf das Feld der Künste beschränkte Ästhetik des ›langen 18. Jahrhunderts‹ strebte eine interdisziplinäre und internationale Kommunikationspraxis an, die eine universelle Verständigung unter den Menschen ermöglichen sollte.

Der Band versammelt Beiträge zu der europäischen Geschichte dieser anthropologisch ausgerichteten ästhetischen Kommunikation. Die Aufsätze der ersten Sektion beschäftigen sich mit der zeitgenössichen Theorie der ästhetischen Wissensvermittlung: Es wird die fachübergreifende (Proto-) Ästhetik Shaftesburys und Addisons, die Sprachtheorie von Coleridge bzw. die schwierige Einbürgerüng der Disziplin ›Ästhetik‹ in Frankreich thematisiert. Im zweiten Teil beschäftigen sich zwei Aufsätze mit der Kommunikation durch Bilder, anhand der Analyse von Gemälden Jean-Siméon Chardins und Caspar David Friedrichs. Die Bedeutung des Bild- und Erzählstoffes ›Herkules am Scheideweg‹ für Wielands ästhetische Kommunikation wird hier ebenfalls behandelt. Die dritte Sektion enthält Untersuchungen zu zwei wichtigen Gattungen der ästhetischen Kommunikation. Es werden zunächst unterschiedliche Varianten des Genres Traumerzählung bei Johann Gottlob Krüger und Mihály Vörösmarty beleuchtet. Der Band schließt mit der Analyse von József Eötvös’ Künstlerroman Der Karthäuser.

Die Fallstudien tragen zu dem besseren Verständnis einer Ästhetik bei, die die Bildung der Menschen durch intersubjektive Kommunikation vorantreiben wollte.

Die 1694 und 1737 inaugurierten Universitäten in Halle und Göttingen gelten in der Forschung als Aufklärungsuniversitäten. Damit geht zum einen die Vorstellung einher, dass sich diese Universitäten in ihrer Struktur, ihrer Lehre und ihrer wissenschaftlichen Ausstrahlung deutlich von den übrigen Universitäten des Alten Reiches unterschieden hätten. Zum anderen werden beide Universitäten gerne aufeinander bezogen, gilt Göttingen als ideeller Nachfolger Halles, auch in der Funktion als Leuchtturm eines aufgeklärten Gelehrtenideals. Im Sammelband werden diese Annahmen auf den Prüfstand gestellt und kritisch erörtert. Dabei geht es erstens um die Frage, inwiefern sich an den Aufklärungsuniversitäten institutionelle Neuerungen ausmachen lassen, die es erlauben, sie als „Reformuniversitäten" zu benennen. Zweitens geht es um das inhaltliche Profil dieser Universitäten in Forschung und Lehre und um die Frage, ob hier neue Formen der Wissensgenerierung zu beobachten sind. Drittens geht es um die Medien, mit denen das Bild von den Aufklärungsuniversitäten zeitgenössisch propagiert und verbreitet worden ist. Und viertens geht es um das Verhältnis der Universitäten Halle und Göttingen zu einander – sei es bei der Frage, inwiefern Göttingen nach dem Vorbild Halles konzipiert worden ist, sei es bei der Beschreibung des besonderen Konkurrenzverhältnisses beider Universitäten.

Im Gegensatz zum drei Jahre jüngeren Schelling, dem er sein Leben lang verbunden blieb, wird Steffens nach seinem Tod nahezu vergessen; in der landläufigen Überlieferung hat er als der Überbringer der Romantik nach Dänemark überlebt. Erst mit Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts wird er als Naturforscher, als Philosoph und Universitätsreformer wiederentdeckt, nicht zuletzt auch im Diskurs-Zusammenhang um das Anthropozän. Steffens-Forscherinnen und Forscher aus Norwegen, Dänemark und Deutschland setzen sich mit dem romantischen Denken der Zeit, mit den Aspekten der nationalen Wiedergeburt in Kultur, Politik und Wissenschaft auseinander, mit Naturgeschichte und Kunst: Marit Bergner, Marie-Theres Federhofer, Bernd Henningsen, Lore Hühn, Daniel Fulda, Norman Kasper, Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen, Jessika Piechocki, Anna Lena Sandberg und Elisabeth Décultot.

The royal civil engineer Nicolas- Antoine Boulanger (1722–1759) represents a peculiarity within the French Enlightenment. Largely unknown during his lifetime, he rose to become an Enlightenment figure of European prominence after his untimely death. This study takes a systematic look at Boulanger for the first time against the background of his posthumous staging as a radical philosophe and asks why a dead man could make such headlines.

Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Henry Home combined empiricism and aesthetics to create an empiricist aesthetics that was received and transformed in the German-speaking world. In the tradition of John Locke, an explanation of thinking and association that is grounded in sensualism takes center stage.

The German Societies that assigned themselves the role of maintaining German "language, poetry, and eloquence" in the eighteenth century are a fixed component of the history of language and literature, and not just because of Johann Christoph Gottsched. However, this volume is the first to consider which goals these societies pursued using which means, what they wrote, and who their members were by looking at the entire German-speaking world.

How did 18th-century writers and politicians measure success and power in the ups and downs of European politics? In the history of international relations, the century between the War of the Spanish Succession and the Congress of Vienna is usually considered as a transition period, during which older categories, such as status and rank, glory and grandeur, which had been central to the value system of European court society, were being superseded by "modern", statistically measurable criteria, which supposedly allowed the rational calculation of the states’ power resources and clout. The contributions to this volume question this interpretation of a seemingly unequivocal transition from pre-modern to modern criteria in the assessment of international politics.

The book chapters examine how the success of European monarchies and republics on the international stage was observed and categorised in the "long eighteenth century", and how the analytical criteria used by political actors as well as the media changed over time. Here, the emergence of new statistical methods and of entire new media genres that focussed on the analysis of states is discussed as well as the role of status conflicts into the 19th century. Other chapters ask which criteria Enlightenment authors introduced to these debates, and what their impact was when the model function of China was questioned, or the legitimacy of the partitions of Poland discussed. Finally, the volume addresses the question to what degree diplomatic theory and practices continued to hold up premises established in Europe since the peace treaties of Westphalia, or if values and guiding principles of diplomats changed fundamentally over the period under consideration. Rather than replacing old categories by new ones, different political actors and commentators evaluated a plurality of criteria, including the status and rank of rulers, the age of dynasties, the attractiveness of courts, the image of individual rulers, military clout, size of population and territory, in ever-new combinations well into the 19th century.

In the late eighteenth century, notions of virtue and strength entered into a discursive alliance that provided guidance in times of profound upheaval, not least in matters of politics, morality, and aesthetics. This study investigates the so far largely overlooked topos of virtue and strength, and takes a new perspective on the relationship between literature, history, and morality around 1800.

The German archaeologists and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) was well received throughout Europe, even during his lifetime. Italy played a central role in this, where his influence went far beyond the borders of classical studies, extending to the realms of political discourse, ethnology, aesthetics, theater, and literature.

Many of those who contributed to the German-language Enlightenment remain unknown today. This study expands our understanding of the Enlightenment in its radical and moderate forms. Focusing on three thinkers and their writings, the work shows that the term "radical" should only be applied after carefully analyzing the subjects that the thinkers address. The thematic range of the Enlightenment is not fixed, and its ideas are highly manifold.

Found in 1694, the University of Halle is considered the birthplace of the German Enlightenment. Which claims to new knowledge and reforms to science and society did the scholars hope to achieve? This volume addresses the question with regard to various disciplines and communicational situations such as teaching, publication, and politics. Innovation was a widespread aspiration; the practice, by contrast, turns out to be much more ambivalent.

The heroes of Schiller’s and Alfieri’s plays experience the hubris and despair that arise from knowing that man is a “god banished into a world of worms.” In his study, Paolo Panizzo identifies a paradigm shift in the work of these late Enlightenment playwrights: from the old European idea of heroic stoicism to the new modern notion of heroic nihilism.

Designed to reform contemporary British society, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Tatler (1709-1711) and The Spectator (1711-1712, 1714) rely heavily on the representation of contemporary manners. In shaping such behavioural images, the authors made use of the satirical character sketch. Their character sketches (re)create social interactions between fictionalised representatives of moral types of men and women located in contemporary London. This study examines how Addison and Steele employed the character sketch to create a ‘cosmography’ of (wo)man by actively engaging with the observational approaches of contemporary naturalists. Addison and Steele adapted distinctly empirical methods (e.g. induction and deduction, note taking, repeated and collective observation) and appropriated the (medico-legal) case study to communicate and disseminate socio-moral knowledge. At the same time, the character sketch served them as a means to establish a taxonomic order of the socio-moral knowledge conveyed in the texts. The study sheds new light on the literary techniques and the methodological frameworks of two journals essentially associated with the British - and the European - Enlightenment.

In addition to his central work on art theory in the 18^th century, Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779) wrote important essays on psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. This volume provides insight into the multifaceted work of an Enlightenment thinker who despite a considerable influence among his contemporaries is rarely the focus of scholarly attention today.

The essays in this volume use an interdisciplinary approach to explore the cantata’s rise as a common musical model with a stable basic structure and highly variable areas of application in 18^th century Germany. The cantata fostered and accelerated the societal, aesthetic, and cultural process of dynamization embodied in the idea of the “early Enlightenment.”

The protagonists in this book – philologists, antiquarians, natural historians – share a key concern: how can one ensure a legacy of permanence and reproducibility, even under adverse conditions? During the period of epistemological upheaval in the early 18^th century, awareness of this problem led to novel, historically unique constellations of practice, knowledge, and imagination.

This is the first fully up-to-date research monograph on Ewald Christian von Kleist (1715–1759). By analyzing his principal work "Der Frühling", the study situates Kleist’s literary oeuvre with regard to the themes of nature and its destruction, rural life, politics and melancholy as well as the moral philosophical, anthropological, and religious context of his era.

Around 1700, German novels featured chivalrous narratives with female protagonists, but only went on to become a "literary genre" in the 18^th century. This study analyzes for the first time the principles of constructing chivalrous femininity in the novel (1690–1720) and describes their specificity in relation to genre and gender while considering poetic, societal, and economic aspects of the world of media and books around 1700.

The period around 1700 is called the pre-Enlightenment, and its societal and ideological breakthroughs are then seen as the prelude for the greater openness of the Enlightenment through reason and critique. Opposing this view, the book examines the moments of openness around 1700 that were soon followed by renewed closure. While the turn-of-the-century’s relative openness made it a fertile experimental field, it also provoked the renewed closure.

This volume seeks to reconstruct the developmental history of imagination in the French Enlightenment era. In chronological order, it presents 27 dossiers that document the notion of imagination, compiled from elements of the 17th-century theory of knowledge and differentiated according to discipline.

The essay became popular in Europe during the 18th century. From early “edifying weeklies” and to the journals published around 1800, the essay served an emergent bourgeois audience as a means of critical reflection. For the first time, this study applies textual analysis to show that essay writers during the Enlightenment conceived of the essay as a technology of the self. It traces the forms of subjectivity developed through essayistic writing.

How did historical discourse change between 1750 and 1850, the era that Koselleck referred to as the “Saddle Period?” Besides the much-debated phenomenon of scientification, what part was played by the love of history, hopes of making a political impact, an orientation to aesthetic memorability, and hypothetical historical designs? Was the old notion of historia magistra vitae truly abandoned or did it live on with a new function?

During the 18^th century, hieroglyphics posed a challenge to the Enlightenment but at the same time, they were cherished material for esotericism. They were seen as puzzling remnants of a now extinct form of communication, somewhere between pictorial writing, gestural language, and symbolism. Hieroglyphics figured prominently in the theory of language and writing, cultural anthropology, theology, theosophy, as well as physiognomy and art theory.

The more than 30 essays in this volume examine the engagement of the Enlightenment with esoteric traditions of the Early Modern Era and the transformative pathways by which Hermeticism, magic, alchemy, and Kabbalah influenced Spiritualism, Occultism, and Theosophy. The contributors explore intersections between the Enlightenment and Esotericism and identify the concerns and preoccupations that made possible the transition to modern esotericism.

This work of academic literary research on emotion addresses the cultivation of gentle melancholy during the Enlightenment era to indicate its positive effects alongside the primarily repressive melancholy of the times. The emotionalization strategies in English and German texts reveal a kind of melancholy that facilitated the ability to speak about emotional phenomena and ultimately served to strengthen emotional autonomy.

How is emotion related to knowledge and understanding? How do emotions influence our engagement with knowledge and our orientation to the world? The articles assembled in this volume examine the 18th century as a time of discovery, when original answers to these questions were developed that continue to be innovative to this day. The articles consider various topics, including the impact of emotions on perception, the importance of narrativity in engaging with one's own emotionality and that of others, and how emotions relate to self-mastery and self-therapy while also facilitating the potential for external control and manipulation.

Johann August Eberhard (1739-1809) was one of the most renowned and controversial proponents of German popular philosophy during the late 18th century. By 1800 at the latest, the triumphal march of Kantian criticism had swept aside this last main proponent of the once popular “Philosophy for the World”. The present volume aims to facilitate interdisciplinary access to the Eberhard’s work by critically scrutinizing existing research studies, with the ultimate intent of reevaluating the work of this philosopher.

To know the nature of a man, noted J. G. Hamann in 1759 in his “Morsels, Crumbs, and Fragments,” you must inquire about the conditions of his life. The 24 essays in the present volume reveal Hamann’s position at the crossroads of different social constellations. They raise new questions about the Königsberg scholar’s ideas regarding the history of society and religion, social theory, economics, philosophy, political science, and religious studies. In this way, they help us to more precisely locate Hamann’s place in the key discourses of the Enlightenment.

Ever since the Enlightenment, hermeneutics have been of critical importance as one of the fundamental principles of the arts and humanities. Their incorporation into the field of historical cognition is associated with one name above all: that of Johann Salomo Semler. As well as leading to a methodical reclassification of all aspects of theology, hermeneutics subjected the notion of Christianity itself to a process of historicisation. Marianne Schröter shows that the question of hermeneutics forms the leitmotif in Semler’s thinking.

Between 1730 and 1770 the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock described in their writings the characteristic features of literary texts using examples of passages which were striking in a pictorial or descriptive, auditory and/or graphical way. Both drew attention to the ability of sensory signs and images with the aid of which man discovers his world. As a result, literature moved from the periphery to the central focus of epistemology and was re-evaluated in its abilities, actions, obligations and intentions.

Aesthetics was founded as a separate philosophical discipline by scholars at the University of Halle in the second third of the 18th century. At the same time, the question of the “whole man” was a topic of heated debate in Halle: a new science of humanity, i.e. anthropology, had begun to emerge. It is therefore appropriate to speak of the “equiprimordiality” of aesthetics and anthropology, the basis of which is explained in this book.

The relationship between theology and literature in the 18th century is not identical to the relationship between religion and literature or piety and literature, neither conceptually nor factually, neither historically nor systematically. On the whole the relationship can be described as unstable, and in detail as difficult and open. Church-historical differentiations in the religious spectrum of Judaism, Catholicism and ‑ with historically appropriate internal differentiation ‑ Protestantism connect the contributions throughout the literary-historical epochs from the Baroque period to Romanticism with the description and analysis of constellations and relationships of competition and supplementation, of confrontation and coexistence. For example, theology learned from literature how to captivate the congregation as an audience; literature ‑ as sermon ‑ wanted to take over the claim to meaning and orientation from theology.

The study is a contribution to the history of the theory of aesthetic thinking in the 18th century using the concept of emotion as its guide. Using an extended notion of aesthetics, texts are drawn upon from philosophical affect theory, from experiential psychology, anthropology and art theory from Descartes via German popular philosophy, and exemplary readings are used to show the basis for turning to the aesthetic subject, to feeling in the discourse of aesthetics in the late 18th century.

Kant as the leading representative of the philosophical enlightenment and the seer Swedenborg, regarded as the father of modern esotericism, would appear at first sight to be two diametrically opposed 18th century figures. At the same time, Swedenborg was one of the few authors to whom Kant dedicated a work of his own – the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Since then, controversy has surrounded Swedenborg’s significance for Kant’s philosophical biography and the history of his works. In the present volume, philosophers, religious scholars, theologians and literary scholars from six countries present their – far from consensual – interpretations of the relationship between Kant’s critical philosophy and Swedenborg’s “visionary realism”.

The Age of Enlightenment continues the debate with traditional elements from Neo-Platonism and Hermetism, Pythagoreanism, magic, alchemy and Kabbalah which today are subsumed under the heading of early modern age esotericism. The reactions range from the critical or historicising to emphatic acceptance and integration. At the same time, however, the discourse of the age also gives rise to polemic confrontations with the newly emerging esoteric formations. The papers in this volume explore these tense constellations with their progression in the 18th century.

In the 18th century, the science of man opened up the conceptual framework for re-interpreting the origins and development of the human species itself. It was the ever more popular reports of 'savages' which had led to a questioning of the biblical account of Creation. Borrowing from scientific methods, the Scottish Enlightenment developed a model of hypothesis-led empirical research into humankind. German popular philosophy in particular carried this conception forward in a variety of ways, but their ability to establish connections and their creativity fell into oblivion as a result of the specialisation and disciplining of the field at the beginning of the 19th century.

The 18th century was also known as the Pedagogical Century. In 1774, Dessau saw philanthropists founding the first reformed school dedicated to the principles of the Enlightenment. The philanthropists revolutionised teaching by designing a child-centred learning strategy. They no longer wished to impart the learning of scholars but to provide practical vocational knowledge for future citizens. All subsequent movements for educational reform in Germany referred to this first comprehensive experimental school developed by the educationalists of the German Enlightenment.

Yvonne Wübben examines a tract on ghosts published in 1747 by the Enlightenment figure and aestheticist G.F. Meier from Halle. She reveals the topical conditions behind its creation, together with its function of bundling
knowledge. The study shows how aesthetics in Halle reacted to an empiricisation of knowledge. Reports of ghosts provide an opportunity to reflect on experience and to make a stand against the ›New Sciences‹ in the market-place of knowledge. Evidence of the patterns of reception developing here can be traced in literary authors (Goethe, Schiller).

This study argues that it would be a foreshortening of Enlightenment discourse to regard prejudice merely as one of the bugbears the Enlightenment set out to dismantle. Rather, the discourse on prejudice served as a mode of self-enlightenment. Anthropologically oriented arguments advanced in literary and popular philosophical reflection on prejudice unsettled the rational certainty with which prejudices were criticized and replaced by the truth. Inquiries into the function of prejudices and attempts to find ways of engaging with them figured as substitutes for philosophical concepts and typologies.

The Swiss author Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728–1795) is widely regarded as a prototype of the physician-cum-writer. The present monograph stems from the research field of literary anthropology. It begins by investigating Zimmermann’s views on human destiny in the contemporary context. Subsequently five sets of issues are addressed as the basis for an analysis of his magum opus Über die Einsamkeit (On Loneliness) (1784/85). In an attempt to situate it in the contemporary landscape, the analysis inquires into the literary features of Zimmermann’s oeuvre against the background of the epoch in which it was written. It also sets out to pinpoint links between Zimmermann’s works and the history of medicine and science, as well as delineating the author’s specific brand of pious Enlightenmentalism.

French historiography between 1670 and 1730 had a dual function to fulfill: generating discursive knowledge and integrating imaging procedures, e.g. in the form of initially disavowed historical imagination. Even before its firm establishment as a discipline in its own right, 'historical vision' was domesticated at the theoretical level by the compromise between pure scholarship and philosophical speculation. At the same time, however, this gave the contribution of imagination to historical epistemology a new value, by virtue both of its greater evidential potential and of its conceptual creativity.

In terms of the moral strictures of German enlightenment, knowledge of human nature was equivalent to judgment on it. The study demonstrates that moral narratives exemplify the resulting epistemological problem besetting moral philosophy, social ethics, and anthropology: the impossibility of truly knowing the Other. They reflect and engage with the contradiction between morals, morality, and judgment inherent in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. By combining morality and behavioural doctrine with a fictional view of the inner life of the Other they compensate for the lack of human knowledge prevalent at the end of the 18th century.

In contradiction to Foucault's theory of the end of resemblance in the 17th century, and in contrast to the conventional view that analogous thinking had ceased to have any major repercussions when the Enlightenment period set in, this study contemplates various philosophical, poetic, and religious analogy formations of the epoch. An overview of the history of this issue reveals analogy models in existence up to 1750. The second part of the study is devoted to forms and figures of analogy in the works of the Königsberg publicist Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), notably in his dialogues with the religious apologetics of the time, and with Socrates, Herder, and Kant.

This volume, based on a colloquium at the Gleim House in Halberstadt, assembles articles devoted to the relationship between rococo literature, Anacreontic tendencies, and Empfindsamkeit (the age of Sensibility) in the Old Empire. They concentrate largely on the period between 1740 and 1780, four decades notable for inter-discursive cross-fertilization between art theory, anthropology, and aesthetics. The articles explore the interrelations and/or differences between the ongoing discourses in cultural psychology, the history of mentality, and moral philosophy, situating them in the overall process of 'Enlightenment'.

18th and 19th century popular calendars are a singular media-historical testimony of everyday experience with an intercultural dimension. The articles assembled here analyze their evolution, the relationship between text and images, characteristics typical of the genre, gender-specific issues, the cross-cultural relevance of this reading matter, and the role of calendars in the popularization of Enlightenment thinking in Germany, France, Switzerland, and the United States. The volume is a product of two research projects funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and the German Research Council and conducted by the editor of the present volume in conjunction with Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Jean-Yves Mollier.

The education program proposed by German philanthropism marks the beginning of modern educational reform. Hitherto unknown is the fact that the sources of this educational theory are to be found in the discourse on the topic in early Hamburg enlightenment as of 1715 and that philanthropist pedagogy was tried out at schools in the state of Denmark in the 1750s. The study describes the early history of philanthropism in detail, concluding that the pedagogic design proposed by Johann Bernhard Basedow and Johann Andreas Cramer was essentially a theologically motivated education in religious tolerance.

The volume assembles papers (some of them extensively revised) given at a symposium on Johann Gottfried Schnabel (1692-?1760) in Halle in early 2002. They aim at an extension of the purview in which the author of »Die Insel Felsenburg« demands to be assessed. New aspects of his work are pointed up by relating it to Leibniz and Thomasius, hermetic philosophy and spectral theology, and contemporary concepts of culture and anthropology. At the same time, a more comprehensive engagement with the relevant genre profiles in the early Enlightenment casts a revealing light on the standing of Schnabel's novels and on his description of festivity in »Das höchst-erfreute Stolberg«.

Research on the subject to date has largely interpreted the paradigmatic shift in late-Enlightenment anthropology (approx. 1750-1800) as a unified process, and has discussed the various fields of study in isolation. The present volume takes a different course. It insists on the close connection between constructivist and subject-related logic in anthropology, and interprets it in terms of a process of increasing differentiation within the contest between the rival views of man as a physical and moral animal. The various articles discuss the following topics and/or interpretive procedures: the relationship between soma and pneuma; the self-generation of man in the process of natural history; anthropology and the genesis of civilization; empiricism as an anthropological form of epistemology; anthropology and utopia; fictional anthropology as an epistemological approach; philosophy, science, and myth.

In his famous »Voyage Round the World«, and also in his essays »More on the Human Races and Outline for a Future History of Mankind«, Georg Forster (1754-1794) took a knowledgeable and committed stand on the central controversies of physical anthropology. In the form of a source-related reconstruction, the present study is the first to point up the allusions and references to the scientific discussion of the day to be found in these texts, and indicates Forster's position in the context of the relevant debates and controversies. Though he did not live to write the >new anthropology< that he was planning, its basic outline thus becomes discernible.

Psychology is central to the work of Christian Wolff (1679-1754). Together with natural law, ethics, politics, and economics, it forms the basis of logic and of practical philosophy. The present volume inquires into the complex problems involved in Wolff's concept of a rational and empirical form of psychology on the one hand, and its fundamental function within Wolff's system of philosophy on the other. In addition, it situates the psychology of Wolff in the history of science between Scholasticism and Kant's critical philosophy.

Recently, societies have come in for increasing attention in research on the 18th century. Earlier the emphasis was on the so-called 'Enlightenment societies' but now a broader range of societalization processes have attracted the interest of humanities scholars and cultural studies experts. Common to them all is an interest in the emergence of sociability, networks and communication structures. This is reflected programmatically in the title of the volume. Studies on individual societies and their members join with analyses of personal and institutional networks to form the basis for an emergent picture of the communicative history of societalization in the 18th century.

The volume goes back to a symposium in Halle in 1998. It essays an examination of the relationship of Christian Thomasius (1655-1733) to the literature and scholarly culture of the period in terms of Pierre Bourdieu's theories on literary and intellectual 'fields'. Taking the concept of field as a more or less explicit heuristic focus on a given subject, the articles inquire into Thomasius' literary and cultural knowledge, his aesthetic and poetological concepts and ideals and the 'economic' aspects of his practical efforts as a scholar, satirist and critic. They also cast light on the impulses he provided for the literary environment. The remaining contributions examine the field structures themselves in which he and the authors he refers to were active, both locally (in Leipzig and Halle) and more widely as a result of the dissemination by print media.

The volume explores the significance of Halle's 'sensitive physicians' (inspired by the writings of Stahl, Krüger, Unzer, E.A. Nicolai, Bolten, and others) for the 'anthropological turn' that took place around 1750. In so doing it sets out in quest of pre-anthropological anthropology (see Platner and the late-Enlightenment 'philosophical physicians' for an analogy). Of central concern are (1) the roots of anthropology and aesthetics (Baumgarten, Meier, etc.) in the context of Stahlianism, pietism, Thomasianism, Wolffianism, (2) the predating of the origins of anthropology from late to early Enlightenment thinking, (3) the common roots of anthropology and aesthetics in a shared anti-Cartesian bid to supplement traditional logic with a 'logic of sensitive knowledge' (aesthetics) and a holistic image of the human animal encompassing body, mind, and spirit (anthropology). The articles break new ground by examining areas of modernism that have been successfully elbowed aside by Cartesian scientism and have thus been largely neglected in the historiography of science. Awareness of the anti-Cartesian currents in aesthetics and anthropology in and around 1750 also points up clear parallels between the 'sensitive physicians' and important tendencies in present-day thinking on psychosomatics and holistic therapy. It also points the way to a 'logic of the individual'.

Erhard Hirsch's study examines the social, political, and artistic preconditions and impacts of a comprehensive modernization process in the central German territory of Anhalt-Dessau in the age of reformer prince Leopold Friedrich Franz. The Wörlitz Garden Kingdom (inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2001) and the 'Philanthropin' educational institution founded in 1774 in Dessau are the central concerns of this interdisciplinary study, closely based on contemporary sources. It promises a rich fund of new insights for literary studies, history, art history, and the history of education, society, and economics.

This pluridisciplinary analysis of these two journals is a substantial contribution to the study of the reception accorded to the French Revolution in Germany. Whereas their authors initially stalwartly championed the ideals of liberty, the headlong radicalization of the situation in France finally prompted them to take a critical stance toward the Revolution. The authors of the »Braunschweigisches Journal« were inspired to turn their gaze to France by hopes of the initiation of a comparable reform policy in Germany, while the authors of the »Schleswigsches Journal« turned away from France in the course of events.

L'étude du »Braunschweigisches Journal« et »Schleswigsches Journal« (1788--1793) permet d'expliquer avec précision les causes et les limites de la réaction des Allemands face à la tourmente révolutionnaire car ces deux revues paraissant des 1788, il est possible de montrer que la réception de la Révolution est indissociable de la répression qui sévit, en Prusse, sous le règne de Frédéric Guillaume II. Confrontés à la politique réactionnaire de son gouvernement, les Philanthropistes qui déterminent la ligne directrice du »Braunschweigisches Journal«, reviennent sur les positions qu'ils avaient formulées jusque-là et insistent sur la nécessité de protéger les droits des individus. Les croyant garantis par la Révolution, les auteurs s'enflamment pour elle. Au fil des mois, ils adoptent donc des positions protolibérales de plus en plus marquées, s'exposant par là à de vives critiques de la part tant des gouvernants que des publicistes conservateurs. L'amertume que les auteurs ressentent vis-à-vis des controverses qui déchirent la République des Lettres est d'autant plus forte que la France trahit, peu à peu, les espoirs qu'ils avaient placés en elle. La dégradation de la situation en France, et la guerre qui s'ensuit, provoquent finalement chez les auteurs du »Schleswigsches Journal« une réaction contraire à celle qu'on pouvait constater chez ceux du »Braunschweigisches Journal« en 1789. Alors qu'à cette date, ils portaient leurs regards vers la France, espérant de leurs souverains une politique de réforme comparable à celle qui s'y produisait, ils les détournent maintenant, croyant pouvoir, par là, sauver les acquis de l'Aufklärung. Néanmoins, même ce mouvement de repli sur soi, qui s'accompagne du refus d'un certain nombre des formes de la sociabilité éclairée et, surtout, d'une prise de parti en faveur de l'absolutisme éclairé s'achève sur un échec.

What does the covert history of the early Enlightenment period look like? Maturin Veyssière La Croze was a Benedictine monk in Paris and later librarian to the Prussian king in Berlin. Tracing his escape routes, networks and intellectual predilections affords an insight into the links between his involvement in the scholarly debates of the day and his personal relations with Jews, atheists and Socinians. The motivating factor for such an inquiry is a French verse adaptation of the Ring Parable in which the tolerance issue is posed in the context of the situation in which exiled Huguenots found themselves after 1685. The quest for the author finally ends among the book producers and réfugiés in Holland around 1720.

In 18th century Germany, the academic establishment of scholarly concern with the phenomena of government and state was closely bound up with the history of the Prussian State University of Halle. Here we find a paradigmatic instance of the way in which the engagement with the idea of state and government itself became an integral factor in the emergence of a particular form of polity. The study is at once a study of early-modern structural change in political science against the backdrop of the history of ideas and an analysis of the university in terms of the sociology of milieu. The transformation in methodological attitudes and the political model of civic order resulting from it show up clearly in the intersection between scholarship and bureaucracy.

In various disciplines, the idea of a 'history of concepts' sparked off innovative research processes after 1945. By contrast, the subject of 'language and the law' harks back to a much older tradition. With reference to the Age of Enlightenment the present volume tests the appositeness of these two approaches by applying them to a number of different issues: problems of terminology in Wolff, Mendelssohn and Kant; the emergence of special languages in Leibniz; legal language and lexicography; the (linguistic) treatment of minorities; legal writing and hermeneutics in the 18th century; enlightened tendencies in legal language; literary transpositions of legal terminologies. The volume sets out to achieve a synthesis between methodological innovation and concrete analysis of source material.

Georg Ernst Stahl (1659-1734) opposed reducing living nature to the inorganic laws of physics or chemistry. His »Theoria Medica Vera« (1708) showed the importance of 'whole person' medicine, in which the unity of all perceptive intelligence, mental, emotional, and physical, are used by the organism to sustain both its moral and material actions. The book traces the life of Stahl and his teaching career at the University of Halle and his influence at the court in Berlin, where he was first physician to King Frederick William I. Special attention is paid to his affiliation with August Hermann Francke and Pietism in Halle, but also to Stahl's popularity in more radical religious circles.

Unlike the globetrotter and revolutionary Georg Forster (1754-1794), Forster as an author and theoretician of perception and description is altogether less well-known. The volume brings together studies on various categories of Forster's work examined for the light they cast on the question of the acquisition of 'reality' by way of 'experience', 'intelligence', 'ideas', 'images' and 'total impressions' and taking place in the tensions obtaining between perception and the construction of possibility. Concrete text analysis and a determination of the effects intended by the author and the methods he employed as a 'social writer' present Forster in a new light.

The volume assembles papers presented at a conference held at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research into the European Enlightenment. The aim of the meeting was to close a conspicuous research gap by looking at the status of journeys on foot in 18th and 19th century travel literature in German. The articles examine autobiographical and literary texts giving representative information on the phenomenon of the new social prestige accorded to journeys on foot (and reflection upon them) identifiable in the second half of the 18th century. Central to this reevaluation was an appreciation of the heightened experience of space and distance denied to coach travelers. The volume closes with a source bibliography of works pertaining to journeys on foot in the period in question.

In the mid 18th century an important reorientation became discernible in Enlightenment discourse. One-sided rationalism was replaced by a conception of the 'whole person' extending its purview to sensual perception and sensibility as an experiential domain of Reason. Against this background, 13 scholars from various disciplines examine what effects this anthropological turn had on utopian literature and the forms of landscape gardening and architecture influenced by it. A remarkable feature of this joint undertaking is that it is the first of its kind to take an interdisciplinary perspective on this paradigmatic change and its implications.

The social substratum of Enlightenment in the ancien régime was constituted by the various Enlightenment societies. Learned and Patriotic Societies, Freemason Lodges, Reading Societies, and Secret Societies assembled aristocrats and burghers, scholars and merchants, professors and students with a hitherto unprecedented singleness of purpose. As yet there has been a signal absence of prosopographic studies on this extensive society landscape in terms of the structures displayed by this 'Fraternity of Enlighteners'. In his study the author takes the example of central German societies of this kind and embarks on a systematic analysis of those structures. How many such societies were there in the 18th century, where and when did they exist? Who were the members? Did the societies exist in mutual isolation or were they interconnected via multiple memberships and society 'careers'? Are there indications for a fully-fledged network of 'enlightened' societies?

The volume contains the proceedings of a conference of the German and Italian Societies for Research into the 18th Century. They range from the Latin-based scholarship of the early 18th century to late-Enlightenment engagement with issues posed by the natural sciences and the theory of culture. The first section "Contacts" is comparative in its approach, dealing with such things as correspondence, change of location, change of context, national standpoints in the evaluation of literature, contrastive scholarly ideals, translations. The second section "Institutions" assembles studies on academicism in opera and drama, the institutionalization of scholarship in academies, and the dissemination of scholarly work by the agency of printers and publishers.

Jakob Friedrich Reimmann stands between Baroque and Enlightenment. He is one of the major representatives of early 18th century historia litteraria, that forgotten discipline which set out to be a history of education, science and the book, and which Reimmann himself applied systematically to a whole range of subjects and cultures. His oeuvre may be seen as typifying the tensions emerging between an inherited faith in providentially ordained history and a new skeptical/hypothetical scientific culture.

From its beginnings with Thomas More, the classical Utopian tradition laid claim to the status of a regulatory principle or ideal. In the 18th century this changed radically. This volume is designed to trace the way in which the Enlightenment brought the problem of how to actually change existing conditions into the discussion on Utopianism, thus generating forms of legitimization for social praxis anticipating developments in the 19th century. The articles were originally papers held at a symposium on "The Politicization of Utopianism in the 18th Century" organized at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research into the European Enlightenment in Halle in early 1995.

The volume assembles papers delivered at a conference in Halberstadt marking the 200th anniversary of Bürger's death and the 275th anniversary of Gleim's birth. They centre around such topics as the friendship between Gleim and Bürger, the concepts of literature and friendship in Gleim's later works, and his correspondence. New light is cast on Bürger's biography, his "Münchhausen", and his teaching at Göttingen University. An annexe contains hitherto unpublished source material on Bürger's social background.

The life and work of Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791) mirror the problems of Protestant Enlightenment theology in the 18th century and the beginnings of a historical-critical form of theology. After a biographical account, the study concentrates subsequently on Semler's understanding of the Bible, his hermeneutics, his stand on christological and soteriological questions and his approach to the idea of perfectibility. The reasons for his influential decision to distinguish between Christian religion and scholarly theology are analysed.

Der Band versammelt die Ergebnisse eines wissenschaftlichen Kolloquiums am Interdisziplinären Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (28.-30.10.1993). In europäischer Perspektive steht im Vordergrund die Batteux-Rezeption in der Halleschen Ästhetik. Im Bereich der Prosa geht es um die dichtungstheoretische Selbstverständigung für utopische Genres. Das Gros der Beiträge beschäftigt sich mit Problemstellungen der sich in Halle konstituierenden Ästhetik (A.G. Baumgarten, G.F. Meier), deren Relevanz für den poetologischen Diskurs der Frühaufklärung und ihre Wirksamkeit in der Dichtungspraxis vornehmlich der beiden Halleschen Dichterschulen (Pietismus, Anakreontik).