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Sarah L. Leonard. Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 272 pp.
Scholars have paid little attention to "obscene and immoral texts" (obszöne und unzüchtige Schriften) in the nineteenth century because of their purported irrelevance and lack of literary quality. Sarah L. Leonard's rigorously researched book, in contrast, takes these texts seriously to show their role in "the growth of civil society" from the 1830s until the 1880s (7). The author looks at multiple actors-legislators, authors, publishers, critics, and readers-and focuses on how they defined, decried, and defended these texts. Leonard argues that the ordinary descriptions of inner life articulated by these actors shed light on the history of the self, political thought, and the history of sexuality during this period. To accomplish this, Leonard examines legal records, booksellers' guild archives, psychiatric and theological journals, and, most importantly, numerous "obscene" texts. Her sources often come from Prussian archives, but she makes a good case about their quality and emphasizes the preeminence of Prussian law after unification. Leonard's book is cultural history at its best. Debates about obscenity have always been about something else. Leonard demonstrates how the regulation of obscenity was linked to the control of knowledge, gender, and class, as well as to the reevaluation of the role of religion and the state in shaping individuals.
The book's five chapters focus on the meanings, defenses, and transformations of obscenity. Leonard shows in the first chapter how legislators and police agreed that novels contributed to the cultivation of the self. Protecting readers from the harmful effects of obscene texts reflected concerns about morality...