This edited collection on the ideas and institutions of the secular, Catholic, and Jewish Bohemian (and sometimes Moravian) Enlightenments does more than make Czech scholarship accessible in English. It reflects on whether the subject is important or unique. Some chapters hint at imitative rather than innovative intellectual developments there. Helga Meise identifies one journal issue plagiarized from Leipzig philosopher Christian Gellert and suggests many of Prague's moral weeklies could be unattributed reproductions. Another essay on access to books reveals that non-Czech ideas were of much more interest to Bohemia's readers and publishers than domestic works. As this edited collection covers the same institutional settings, fields of philosophic inquiry, and publication methods seen in more prominent centers of Enlightenment thought, Ivo Cerman's introduction and the afterword by David Sorkin directly address imagined challenges to the importance of the Bohemian Enlightenment. Though Cerman labels the region peripheral, he argues that studying the “confused ways of the Enlightenment in Habsburg Bohemia” (32) adds to understandings of the movement's breadth. Sorkin makes the case for studying the Enlightenment in such a place because intellectual and cultural practices in Bohemia were in some areas advanced, in others behind, and thus illustrates its diversity in a way Paris cannot.

Sorkin's culminating analysis establishes the complex social, political, and religious interactions behind the region's intellectual culture. The introduction goes beyond such tasks to ambitiously redefine the Enlightenment as an enterprise “that tried to uphold morality by seeking a philosophical basis for morality after Revelation lost its motivational force” (7). Much of the ensuing volume adopts this moral focus. In the first section on institutions (scientific societies, universities, and freemasonry) and publishing practices in Bohemia, Rita Kruger uncovers associational activity that reflected European-wide practices but still sought to define and elevate local community, patriotic self-promotion, and linguistic pride. Andreas Önnerfors's essay on freemasonic morality liberally interprets the book's geographic scope to discuss an essay written and published by a Viennese lodge. The influence of Vienna and the central government in the Bohemian Enlightenment is also elaborated in an article that reveals Vienna's limited reach through censorship but concludes that the capital effectively controlled awareness of prohibited works in Prague.

The sections on personalities and ideas in the Bohemian Enlightenment muddy this picture of the capital's influence on the province. Cerman assesses secular morality through detailed intellectual histories on the influence of Wolffian ideas among Prague's Jesuits, the controversial university lectures of Karl Heinrich Seibt that constructed moral systems through literature and anthropology, and the works of a Francophile nobleman whose ideas on the elitism of truth ran counter to much of what historians associate with enlightenment thought. A fascinating article on the diverse responses of three monastic leaders to Catholic reform movements, changes decreed from the state, and enlightenment ideas shows the nuances in thought and action of those identified with counter-Enlightenment principles. Martin Gaži concludes, “[p]eople formed by baroque piety in their youth could gradually, slowly, and perhaps without any sign of internal conflict, identify with the ideas of reform” (207).

Jaroslav Lorman's contribution discusses a leader in Bohemian religious education whose writings wrestle critically with contemporary discourse on reason. Another article describes a politically astute chief rabbi in Prague who negotiated well the divisions within the Jewish community as the Haskalah emerged, and also skillfully represented his religious community within a Christian state through critical Habsburg patriotism. Together these studies on ideas emerging in secular, Catholic, and Jewish contexts illustrate a complex yet rich culture of ideas that defy any simple separation between Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, radical advocates for change and defenders of tradition, and elite and popular ideas. Chapters on Jewish reform movements in education neatly conclude the book with a look past the eighteenth century.

The book's contributors provide a wealth of information that reveals the patterns of Enlightenment in Central Europe. It will be of interest for Habsburg and eighteenth-century scholars, though students may find difficulty in some chapters' translations. The research shows Bohemian intellectual circles' facility with multiple languages, social diversity, variety of organizations and institutions for intellectual exchange, and the convergence of secular ideas, French and German Protestant influences, and both the reformed and conservative strands of Catholicism and Judaism. The region's writers addressed the degree of access to ideas, general social and economic advancement, and shifting historical connections to Habsburg state power and religious authority. Whether moral or rational, critical or supportive of the state and religion, the Bohemian Enlightenment presented a new attitude, culture, and even language reflective of change.