BOOK REVIEWS jecs_134 439 . . • •

The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. JonathanSheehan. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2005. xvi + 273. 13 lineillus. £29.95. hb. 978-0-691-13069-9.

For Jonathan Sheehan secularisation is necessarily incomplete. It does not entail theelimination of religion from politics and popular culture; rather, it is a processwhereby religion evolves in response to the changing intellectual environment.Sheehan takes the Christian Bible as a case in point. If secularisation meant only thesteady erosion of religion, the Bible would occupy a marginal place in modernWestern civilisation. Instead, the Bible’s central place in Western culture is a point ofalmost universal agreement. This, as Sheehan underlines, should be a matter ofremark. Accordingly, he sets out to show how the Bible was transposed, during thecourse of the Enlightenment, from a source of theological authority to an icon of theWest’s cultural heritage.

In 1700, Sheehan argues, there was only one reason to read the Bible, namely thatit contained the means of salvation, but by the end of the century other possiblemotives had emerged. This period saw in England and Germany an explosion ofscholarly interest in the scriptures. This academic endeavour forged a new and pluralEnlightenment Bible. Scholars and translators approached the text with differentmotives and created different Bibles as a result. Some sought to secure its reliability bythe exercise of scientific philology, treating it as a document whose scholarly interestwas independent of the theological truths it contained. Some sought to liberate thepedagogical value of the text by translating it in a way that shed the dead weight ofconfessional orthodoxy and set a suitably inspiring moral tone. Some looked to theBible as a sublime aesthetic achievement and wanted it to speak beautifully to themodern age. Some found in the Bible the record of an ancient, alien civilisation,thus investing it with an archival and historical weight. As the eighteenth centurybecame the nineteenth, and the concept of national culture began to emerge, theplural Bible of the Enlightenment, whose significance no longer rested exclusively onits theological authority, was able to survive within this developing matrix of culture,reacquiring unity, coherence and importance as a work of culture rather than a workof theology.

Sheehan’s book is both important and lively. As a study of Enlightenmentapproaches to scriptural scholarship in England and Germany, it is excellent. Hecharts the flow of influence back and forth across the North Sea, noting the differentintellectual and religious temper of each nation and underlining the particularsignificance within Germany of Pietist scholarship. He presents the disparateelements of Enlightenment biblical enterprise with clarity. Sheehan’s account of thetransition between the Bible of the Enlightenment and the cultural Bible is, perhaps,less convincing. He does not show how the diverse Enlightenment Bibles actuallybecame the cultural Bible. As a result, the last section of his work leaves theimpression that the cultural Bible simply displaced them, when a demonstrablecontinuity is surely central to his argument. His handling of Schleiermacher alsoraises questions. Sheehan wants to see him as one of the architects of the cultural

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 32 No. 3 (2009)

© 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Bible. Schleiermacher’s own theology of scripture (set out in the Christian Faith,which Sheehan does not cite) makes clear that his principal interest in the Bible is asa means of preserving and evoking a specifically Christian and Protestant piety.Sheehan’s picture of the stasis of the biblical text in the seventeenth century is alsooverdrawn. He does not refer to the debate between Cappel and Buxtorf aboutthe Hebrew vowel points, a debate that undermines Sheehan’s claim that ‘the text ofthe original bible was largely static’ during the seventeenth century. The lack of abibliography is also unhelpful. Nonetheless, Sheehan’s book is a lively, detailed andinformative analysis of eighteenth-century biblical scholarship.

Stephen HamptonPeterhouse, Cambridge

Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe. Edited by Ole Peter Grell andAndrew Cunningham. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2007. viii + 267. £55. hb. 0-7546-5638-8.

Most conventional analyses of medicine in the long eighteenth century see sciencedisplacing religion as the basis for both understanding and treating mental andphysical ailments. Such interpretations rest on a broadly Weberian framework, wherethe concept of ‘rationalisation’ links the psychic and the scientific by suggesting thatnotions of wonder and mystery were displaced from human life by consistent attemptsto construe events in forms that could be calculated and therefore predicted andcontrolled. In this scheme medicine was both a symptom of modernisation and a forcefor promoting attitudinal change. However, historians now recognise that medicalpractitioners, as much as they were the purveyors of objective science, were them-selves profoundly social (and political) beings, as subject to these pressures and tomoral–religious imperatives as those whom they treated.

Coming out of a Cambridge conference in 2004, the varied contributions tothis volume highlight the shortcomings of simple transitional models and, whileproviding some support for a link between medicalisation and secularisation, stresstoo the continuing mutual dependency of religion and medicine. Thirteen chaptersfrom a range of heavyweight European and North American intellectual historianscover Britain and the Continent, although most of the contributions are aboutCatholic countries and about the way the Counter-Reformation handled all sorts ofchange. The substantive chapters are prefaced by a very brief introduction fromCunningham. They vary in length but are of a uniformly high standard andpleasingly coherent. One important theme is that the relationship between religionand medicine depends on the nature of each country’s Enlightenment. The Dutch onewas radical, and doctors tended to be free-thinkers who pushed forward the study of,for example, natural history as ‘pure’ science (chapters 1, 8); in Scotland it was theopposite, for natural law theory was introduced into ‘the science of the mind’ todefend religion, bolstering both science and religion (chapter 13); the supposedlydominant anti-clericalism of the French Enlightenment is cast in doubt by analysingdoctors’ libraries to create a more nuanced account of changing ideas (chapter 6).Another theme is that while ‘rational’ medicine could be liberating, it could also berepressive (chapters 2, 3, 4). A third is that religion itself could determine how aperson thought about medicine (chapter 7), while medical ideas could be usedinstrumentally to belabour rival religions (chapter 10).

The book is excellent on the history of ideas – how people thought about medicineand religion – but left this reviewer hungering for what they actually did. Some

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© 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies