Andrew C. Thompson

Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-century Germany: Midelfort, H. C. Erik: New Haven: Yale University Press, 219 pp., Publication Date: July 2005

A few moments with William D. Godsey’s book reveals his deep affection for his subject. A research fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the author of a book on the social composition of the Habsburg foreign office on the eve of World War I, Godsey has visited archives across Europe and has an easy familiarity with the history of dozens of noble families. Here, he examines a small group (sixty families) of Free Imperial Knights centered on Mainz. His study will interest anyone who studies the Free Imperial Knights or nobility more broadly, but his narrow focus makes the broader connections he draws more suggestive than conclusive. The core of Godsey’s argument is contained in two analytical chapters. Before the French Revolution, he suggests, the older conception of the nobility as a group distinguished by virtue inherited from both the paternal and maternal families was eroding. Nevertheless, language, economic and cultural ties, and religious affiliations remained intertwined and intermeshed throughout this region. With political boundaries porous and cultural identities fluid, nobles never conceived of “nations” defined by culture or ethnicity. The French Revolution destroyed what Godsey calls this “geo-cultural landscape,” forcing nobles to reassess their identity and their claims for political and social power. Godsey argues that the choices made by families that fled to the Habsburg monarchy differed in fundamental and long-lasting ways from those who chose to associate themselves with “Germany.” The latter reacted by reimagining the “nation” and nobility itself. Recasting nobility to rest on the antiquity of the paternal family and identifying landholding as a source of nobility, these nobles announced themselves members of a cultural German nation. In contrast, those leaving for the imperial court retained a traditional image of nobility and rejected or ignored new understandings of the nation. While Godsey’s analysis is suggestive, the study, and, perhaps, the size of his sample, is too thin to be conclusive. Much of the book consists of case studies of a few families, which demonstrate, as he suggests, a range of possible responses, but in themselves they are insufficient to really prove his thesis. Moreover, some of Godsey’s more interesting speculations take him beyond the limited scope of his book and await more complete treatment by other historians. Godsey’s book is not for everyone. Undergraduates will find it much too specialized and some of the more technical terms he employs may puzzle even modem European historians. Moreover, the very thoroughness of his research occasionally makes his study difficult to digest. Still, the book will interest specialists in the history of the nobility and, more tentatively, historians of nationalism.

The Making of English National Identity: Kumar, Krishan: New York: Cambridge University Press 382 pp., Publication Date: January 2003

attracted to antimaterialist, postmodern theories and the jargon that goes with them, but he does not want to abandon the insights of E.P. Thompson and other social historians under whose influence he was trained. Together, the essays in this volume reflect Epstein’s consciKumar, Krishan The Making of English National Identity New York Cambridge University Press 382 PP

Eighteenth-Century Britain: 1688–1783: Black, Jeremy: New York: Palgrave, 312 pp., Publication Date: September 2001

70.00 cloth,

The Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c. 1870–1939

25.00 Paper ISBN 0-521-77188-9 ISBN 0-521-77736-4 paper Pub,ication Date: January 2o03

POPERY, POLITICS, AND PRIVATE JUDGEMENT IN EARLY HANOVERIAN BRITAIN

The purpose of Useful Knowledge, according t o Alan Kauch, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is to analyze the “widespread dissemination of a commodity of knowledge” (9) in English culture from I820 to 1860. Specifically, Rauch is interested in the impact of science and technology as it appears in several popular novels written during that time. The book is geared to the general reader who has some understanding of the Victorian era; and although one may find terms such as “knowledge,” “science,” and “technology” nebulous, Rauch presents a “useful” discussion. ’The introduction offers a summary of the growth of “knowledge texts,” for example, encyclopedias, manuals, and both adult and children’s fiction, and treats the connection bctween new knowledge and the novel. The second chapter discusses the pursuit of scientific and technological inquiry up to the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1 XS9), which greatly influenced religion, middle-class culture, and the notion of moral responsibility. That dissemination and diffusion of new knowledge in fiction served as a low threshold for the post-Darwinian world that followed. The remaining five chapters investigate specific novels, with some critical literary insights shoring up Rauch’s hypothesis that science and technology elements served as a focus for reader edification, “the march of the mind,” as it was termed at the time. In Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1 827), one sees an early vision of a Brave New World where, possibly, everyone will benefit from science, and where the traditional Judeo-Christian values will serve as moral guidelines. This moral recovery through technology, however, is not found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Noted as a “monstrous body of knowledge” (96j, Shelley’s novel contains a vision where science and moral obligation are sorely conflicted. Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor (1846) is not s o dramatic or speculative. It explores class differences and the impact of knowledge, exposing Bronte’s concern ahout social progress. Charles Kingsley ’s Alton Locke: 7klililor and Poet (1850) suggested that science and religion could be reconciled and lead to social justice, whereas George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1 860) expressed the growing popular sense that religion was an inadequate formula for social good and that science was possibly society’s only salvation. Not an easy read, this book offers compelling insights to the problem the Victorians I’aced in understanding their universe while