This thoughtful and detailed study explores the ambivalent role of religion in the political landscape of Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It scrutinises the extent to which Protestantism was related to the German Enlightenment. The interest of this wide-ranging research is not so much the actual impact that Protestantism had on the Enlightenment but rather the different ways in which a narrative about this alleged relationship ensued during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Printy shows admirably and, with increasing rarity in our times, sine ira et sudio, how these competing narratives served historical and philosophical agendas of very different political and philosophical aims. These competing narratives forged specific accounts of the Reformation, which became a formidable tool in the political and cultural battles.

Printy presents these various approaches and does not aim to assess their validity nor whether their claims to truth are justified. What he explores are the different, often competing, ways in which the history of Protestantism was developed in these discourses. The claim that Protestantism advanced and defended freedom, in various shades and forms, was at the heart of these narratives. This looks like a Foucauldian approach towards emancipatory claims yet should, of course, not be reduced to such a single outlook. Printy brilliantly navigates these issues by stepping back to assess the wealth of sources. Presumably, hardly anyone would want to speak against progressive alternatives and emancipation. Yet, as Printy sees quite clearly, it is not at all clear why such a claim to freedom, progress, modernity and emancipation should of itself lead to a superior religion or philosophy. It would first be necessary to concretely determine what is actually meant by these concepts. Printy shows, at least implicitly, that these historical narratives about Protestantism are themselves also only discourses governed by particular interests yet claiming superiority of interpretation for itself. Using and instrumentalising historical narratives to advance political and societal aspirations is obviously a legitimate enterprise. It is the task of the historian of political thought, however, to scrutinise as much the sinews and tactics of such undertakings as the underlying interests. Printy does this in an exemplary manner.

One of Printy’s central themes concerns the way in which late eighteenth-century philosophers provided interpretations of the Reformation in order to reshape contemporary religion and philosophy and the relations between them. In his discussion of Johann Joachim Spalding, for example, Printy shows how Spalding sought to conscript Protestant freedom to a reconfiguration of Christianity in the form of subjective moral self-cultivation. Printy observes that in his popular Die Bestimmung des Menschen, Spalding exerted a shaping influence on Protestant culture in the 1750s and was especially important because of his ‘influence on the Protestant reading public’ (p. 45).

The emergence of a public sphere is another red thread which runs through the volume. The ‘conflation of philosophy and theology’ (p. 54) and the debates it triggered also underpinned this development. ‘As important as the actual social configuration of this public was the public as an ideological construct to which writers appealed for legitimation and authority’ (p. 103). The second chapter focuses on Arnold and Mosheim and their histories of heresy. These were effectively a vehicle of a confessional history of modern Protestantism. At this stage the reader would expect some consideration about ‘modernity’, since it is at best problematic if it is conceived in a linear progressive line, at the end of which our modernity stands as a positive end point. Printy turns to these issues towards the end of his study in his insightful and, again, wide-ranging epilogue (cf. pp. 238–42).

Throughout the volume another red thread is woven into the analysis and concerns the concept of freedom. Luther had perceived freedom foremost as the freedom of conscience; in the hands of Thomasius, Spalding and others it became a claim ‘to think freely and examine doctrine’ (p. 110), before it turned into a demand for political freedom. Thus, Luther was presented as an advocate and promoter (Beförderer) of civil political freedom (cf. p. 197). The intellectual-historical approach advocated by Printy pursues the goal of evaluating past utterances as historically positioned statements made by real individuals engaged in intellectual battle. This applies not only to rival positions within Protestantism and enlightenment philosophies, but with equal validity to German idealism and early nineteenth-century philosophy, which attempted to dominate and decide the intellectual battle of the early 1800s. Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher and Hegel all took part in this process and often presented themselves as – in the words of Schleiermacher – the ‘true sons of the Reformation’ (p. 187). Printy’s contextualist intellectual history thus refreshingly and ably demystifies the emancipatory rhetoric and use of these competing historical narratives about Protestantism and freedom.

This study digests a rich wealth of sources and materials and occasionally it would have been easier for the less initiated reader to follow if Printy had provided some more explicit explanations. This is in part to acknowledge the challenges posed by the wide scope of the book, which engages not only with the period between 1750 and 1830 but also with the beginnings of the Reformation and the early differentiation of Lutheran orthodoxy, Pietism, and the impact of natural law thinkers such as Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius on theological debates in the later half of the seventeenth century. This study perhaps assumes a little too much detailed knowledge of historical events, concepts and controversies in Germany during the period covered. As a result, this thought-provoking study is mostly intended for an expert audience. It will doubtless be welcomed as a crucial and original addition to the huge field of research on the Reformation and the Enlightenment. However, the more ambitious aim of unearthing how the philosophical, religious and political intersection of early nineteenth century German discourse used the historical narrative treating these earlier epochs in peculiar ways provides the real treasure trove of this brilliant book.

It is surely not the fault of the author of this excellent study, but the quality of Cambridge’s hardback volume has considerably declined – my copy literally fell apart before I had finished reading it. Is this what happens when a University Press goes digital and does not believe in printed books any longer?