Fifty years ago, Frances A. Yates of the Warburg Institute in the University of London released her pioneering study The Rosicrucian enlightenment (1972). The book was welcomed by such early reviewers as the novelist Anthony Powell. However, it met with less success among academic historians, who concentrated on the leaps made between German theologians of one period and British scientists of another. They ignored Yates's insistence that she used the name ‘Rosicrucian’ in a narrow sense and the word ‘enlightenment’ in a general sense, not limited to one historical period or school of thought. It has taken a half-century for scholars to fill in the gaps, revisiting, supplementing and revising the connections that Yates made as she formed a lineage reaching throughout the Renaissance and Reformation to the eve of modernity. As in her 1964 book on Giordano Bruno, she called it ‘the Hermetic tradition’.

The new study by Lyke de Vries is a welcome addition to the work of Yates and later scholars of Rosicrucianism as an undercurrent in the intellectual history of early modern Europe. Yates's successors include such luminaries as Martin Brecht in Germany, Roland Edighoffer in France, Susanna Åkerman in Sweden and Christopher Macintosh in England and Germany – a truly international enterprise. De Vries's acknowledgments list a dream team of mentors ranging from Carlos Gilly in Spain to Didier Kahn in France and Howard Hotson in England, the last of whom created and edits the Universal Reform series in which her book appears. As a researcher who read Yates's study when it first appeared and spent later decades working through British connections with the early Rosicrucian documents, I can only say how significant her book is. I wish I had had access to it before bringing my own investigations to press.

Following the introduction, which offers an overview of the Rosicrucian movement from the printing of the original manifestos until discussion of them abated during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the book has three major sections. The first two discuss the intellectual origins of the manifestos of 1614 and 1615, which respectively introduced the long-secret fraternity and announced its main beliefs. The first section reviews their content while the second discusses their authorship. The third section, which may prove the most interesting to readers of this Journal, treats early responses to the manifestos and related publications. Even the earliest readers could tell that the manifestos were written from a Protestant perspective. Readers liked or loathed what they found depending on how much it supported or contradicted their personal views. Current consensus is that the manifestos originated in a small group of learned Lutherans in Tübingen; however, some early readers thought the authors must be Calvinists because the Rosicrucian brothers are members of the elect, while others thought they were overly progressive Lutherans if not Anabaptists, Waldensians or antinomians of a different sort. In England, the label ‘gnostic’ was later applied to them.

There is also a valuable appendix that connects aphorisms once attributed to Tobias Hess, the central figure in the Tübingen group, to the new brotherhood's ‘confession’ of beliefs. Published in 1616, the sayings were gathered by Johann Valentin Andreae, a student living in Hess's home when the manifestos were begun in 1604. A recent edition of the sayings (2003) attributes them to Andreae himself, though de Vries offers evidence of Hess's contributions (pp. 181–4). That Andreae brought the sayings to print under Hess's name lends credence to Yates's view that he tried to distance himself from the Rosicrucian reforms, being a student no longer but a Lutheran minister with a congregation to serve.

Although this book nicely fits the scope of the Universal Reform series, one has to wonder whether the aims of the original documents have not been somewhat misrepresented.

The manifestos predict reform in religion and politics as well as learning. However, they emerged from a group with divergent interests. De Vries treats it as an accident in the printing process that the first manifesto was preceded in the 1614 volume by the German translation of a recent satire on the ‘General Reformation of the Whole Wide World’, written by the Italian historian Trajano Boccalini (pp. 167–8). In that satire, Apollo orders the Seven Sages of Greece to propose such reforms; however, the sages conclude after much discussion that the best one can do is to lead an honest life. I suspect the translation was made by the multilingual Christoph Besold, a member of the Tübingen group who mentored Andreae but dissociated himself from the manifestos (pp. 175–6). When Andreae circulated the first manifesto in manuscript, as he is known to have done, he could have added the translated satire to let those who disliked the idea of the new fraternity regard it as pure fantasy.

There is some evidence here. Andreae, who has emerged from recent studies as principal author of both manifestos, was devoted to the learned satires of Erasmus, of which The praise of folly is the best known. Such writing belongs to the subgenre called Menippean satire, and Andreae wrote a book with 100 satiric dialogues. It was entitled Menippus (1617), and the dialogues included ‘Fraternitatis’, ‘Reformatio’ and ‘Utopia’ (nos 12, 47, 68). Moreover, ‘Fraternitatis’ used the Latin word ludibrium (‘plaything’ or ‘joke’), which Andreae later applied to the Rosicrucian phenomenon as a whole.

Of course, there is not space for every Rosicrucian author and text in this comprehensive study. I would like to have seen something about Georg Molther, a Paracelsian physician who wrote two early essays about Rosicrucians and their advice to prospective members. Nevertheless, this book should be welcomed by anyone seeking a sounder knowledge of Rosicrucian origins.