Reviewed by: The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment by Ethan Shagan Rose Luminiello The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment BY ETHAN SHAGAN Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. xiv + 385 pages. Hardback: $35.00/£30.00. ISBN: 9780691174747. The Birth of Modern Belief is a triumphant re-examination of what we mean by "belief." In this book Ethan Shagan takes his readers on an erudite journey through intellectual history, into diverse histories of philosophy, theology, and social power through most of human history. Starting with the European Middle Ages and the collective belief in the Catholic Church, Shagan traces how belief as a concept shifted, and why these shifts were related to various forms of social and religious inclusion and exclusion. The author follows the development of belief through its Early Modern and Reformation iterations as multiple belief systems. He argues that redefining the category of belief by defining the "unbeliever" opened up the category of belief to dissent and disagreement, both acceptable and unacceptable. Shagan explains this as a new mode of belief in which "Catholics disciplined populations to believe, Protestants learned how to [End Page 171] discipline unbelievers"—the Catholics, he argues, tightened control of belief by relying on their authority, while Reformation Protestants continued to tighten definitions of true belief and policing those who did not have it (124–25). Just as he has offered a new understanding of the Reformation through the lens of belief, Shagan also proffers a reframing of the Enlightenment project of rationalizing belief as a period wherein belief became "a second-order commitment to the autonomous judgment of the believing subject," a model which overthrew the confessional project of belief (247). This book is written in such an engaging, relaxed, and truly masterful manner that it is hard to believe that you have come to modern belief and the end of the book so quickly, despite the vast amount of historical knowledge imparted to the reader since the introduction. Modern belief, Shagan argues, owes its heritage to the Enlightenment as he framed it. It is the state of society in which all individually held beliefs are equal. Modern belief, broadly speaking, has not disappeared with secularism but rather abounded, and burst beyond the boundaries of religion to encompass belief in such things as government, nature, science, and beyond. In the Birth of Modern Belief Shagan provides a nuanced historical account of the philosophical and theological developments of belief in which it has been simultaneously a category of inclusion and exclusion, reason, and faith. Although some scholars have taken issue with Shagan's use of the traditional division of history into periods comprised of the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, and Modernity, his evaluation of the development of intellectual thought, rather, reinforces the appropriateness of these divisions. The author has offered historians and scholars in many disciplines a new way to understand how belief and belonging are intrinsically tied together throughout European history and how the process of either justifying one's belonging or excluding others has been done through intellectual exercises and theological belief. The thread Shagan traces through centuries of intellectual thought ultimately delivers a new framework to understand not only our historical antecedents, but the ways in which we engage with belonging today. This book, for example, would greatly enhance studies of political allegiance and partisanship by providing an understanding of how people come to "believe in" politicians in the first place, and what that means for communal belonging. For Newman scholars, The Birth of Modern Belief offers a significant contribution to Newman's intellectual negotiations of and writings on his own belief. Shagan posits, for example, that the Enlightenment effect on belief was the emphasis on the individual's ability to judge what should be believed through a value system of probabilities and historical belief. Particularly around his conversion, this was exactly the process in which Newman engaged. In the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, for example, Newman appealed to reason to explain his belief in Catholicism and claimed that the world may judge truth and virtue, and...