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Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850. Edited by Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa. San Marino, Cal.: Huntington Library, 1998. 206 pp. $15.00 paper.
Based on the proceedings of a workshop sponsored by the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and published simultaneously as volume 60, numbers 1-2, of the Huntington Library Quarterly, this collection of papers analyzes the use of the term "enthusiasm." Plato in the dialogue between Ion and Socrates first tied the term enthusiasm to the way a poet and a person reciting poetry can become enthralled by the divine. The authors of this collection agree that during the Enlightenment the term was used more broadly and unpredictably with negative and positive connotations. All agree that the term became important for delineating some boundaries and obfuscating others. The primary lesson of the whole book is that the use of "enthusiasm" was complex and that scholars should be wary of oversimplified descriptions of usage. The authors intention is "to problematicize through examinations of the discourse of enthusiasm" (3). Michael Heyd's "Be Sober and Reasonable": The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995) is recognized by the editors as the most important recent work on the subject. They note, however, that the essays in their collection extend beyond Heyd's "intellectual history" into "new areas of cultural, and, in a loose sense, social history" (2).
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