Reformation, Revolution, Renovation: The Roots and Reception of the Rosicrucian Call for General Reform by Lyke de Vries

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reformation, Revolution, Renovation: The Roots and Reception of the Rosicrucian Call for General Reform by Lyke de Vries Timothy Grieve-Carlson lyke de vries. Reformation, Revolution, Renovation: The Roots and Reception of the Rosicrucian Call for General Reform. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Pp. x + 432. The meaning of the word "Rosicrucian" is persistently confounding, not only for the everyday reader, but perhaps especially for scholars who specialize in Western Esotericism. Even a glancing encounter with the label in a primary document requires us to pause, reread closely, and carefully attempt to figure out exactly which meaning of the word "Rosicrucian" is in front of us. This confusion stems from the strange panoply of meanings, beliefs, and organizations with which the word has been associated since its appearance at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the label "Rosicrucian" meant something rather specific. But, as Frances Yates (who, despite a few necessary critiques and corrections, remains a profound interpreter of the subject) puts it, by the nineteenth century, the word took on such "strange vagaries," such a plurality of dissonant meanings and contested claims, that it becomes almost useless as an emic or etic category. The persistence of these "strange vagaries" in the meaning of Rosicrucianism is one of many reasons to welcome Lyke de Vries's new book Reformation, Revolution, Renovation: The Roots and Reception of the Rosicrucian Call for General Reform. De Vries's analysis focuses on the controversy that followed the publication of the original Rosicrucian texts in seventeenth-century Europe, animated by a single research question: "What did some readers find so attractive, and others so dangerous" about the Rosicrucian manifestos (19)? De Vries isolates a specific answer: the idea of a general reformation, which was "most central to the Rosicrucian cause" (19). The "principal aim" of the manifestos, argues de Vries, was a "reformation of religion, politics, and knowledge" (167). The notion of Rosicrucianism as a cause—that is, a call to political action if not a defined political program—is surprising at first, but de Vries makes the case well. The Rosicrucian manifestos appeared in a context of "anti-establishment reformative zeal," when calls for change—in politics, science, religion—were still dissenting, [End Page 470] but increasingly common. De Vries organizes the analysis into three parts: the history of the ideas and themes present in the content of the manifestos themselves, the ideological positions of the likely authors, and the response following their publication. The first section of the book deliberately sets aside the question of authorship to focus exclusively on the contents of the texts and their intellectual context in seventeenth-century Europe. De Vries's decision to arrange the analysis in this order bears fruit with her conclusion that the Rosicrucian manifestos should not be interpreted as straightforwardly Lutheran texts, despite the backgrounds of the authors. As de Vries convincingly argues, "the contents of the manifestos have very little in common with Lutheran orthodoxy, and with [Lutheran] pessimism regarding human nature and the terrestrial future" (361). Rather, the basic ideological framework of the texts themselves has much more in common with Paracelsianism. The Rosicrucian brethren portrayed in the manifestos saw themselves as physicians in a Paracelsian mold, setting out to cure an ailing body politic which they expected to completely recover—eventually. In the second part of the book, de Vries turns directly to the authors of the Rosicrucian texts, Johannes Valentinus Andreae and Tobias Hess. In this section, de Vries engages the claim that the manifestos do not merely take the form of a fable, but that they were actually a kind of prank, not meant to be taken seriously at all. De Vries's analysis of the uses of fiction to communicate sophisticated ideas in the early modern period shows how reformers consistently masked their critiques in fiction, humor, and fable. Andreae in particular memorably claimed that "he preferred writing ludibria [humorous or unserious writing] to serious treatises because he favored laughter over prosecution" (364). In a rhetorical style that we can see in a variety of political contexts today, humor and fantasy can provide enough plausible deniability to vastly open the horizon of acceptable political claims. And as...