Abstract
Jonathan Sheehan's excellent The Enlightenment Bible explores how authority of the Bible was reconstituted as a piece of heritage of the West (xi) between the Reformation and the nineteenth century in both Germany and England. Sheehan has written a book about the Bible that is both learned and accessible, making The Enlightenment Bible a worthy sequel to the classic works of Hans Frei, Stephen Pricket, and David Norton, and historical surveys by Christopher Hill and Brian Moynahan of the Bible and its influence on particular eras. Sheehan's argument also complements and complicates the idea of a conservative clerical Enlightenment offered by historians such as J. G. A. Pocock, Jonathan Clark, and Brian Young. Like them, Sheehan rejects the traditional association of the Enlightenment and secularization, which he understands to be more about the transformation and reconstruction of religion than its disappearance (xi). Rather than constituting a single, sacred object like the Reformation Bible, the Enlightenment Bible becomes an ongoing intellectual project (91) designed to demonstrate the Bible's continued relevancy to evolving modernity. The Bible in the eighteenth century gained a range of new authorities grounded in the modern disciplinary domains of philology, pedagogy, history, and poetry (91).
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