The term “Enlightenment,” like the term “Renaissance,” is a useful term, even though we recognize that using it is akin to herding cats. Anthony Grafton, with his many collections of biographical studies, has shown us the value of allowing the cats to be cats, thus allowing a chronological-cultural category such as “Enlightenment” to accumulate its meanings, bottom up. Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner follow Grafton's lead in their wide-ranging collection of biographical studies titled Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe. The book promotes the existence of a “Catholic Enlightenment” and wrangles twenty-one biographical sketches of Catholic intellectuals from a variety of different regions of Europe. The editors hope “to ignite broader interest” within “the dynamism now characteristic of eighteenth-century and Enlightenment studies” (1).

The collection begins with Mario Rosa's analysis of Pope Benedict XIV as an “Ambivalent Enlightener” who tried to promote, yet hold in check, critical historical and scientific thought, while also curbing, yet supporting, stories of mystical visionary phenomena and miracles. To the Jews he remained restrictive, while also offering more liberty. Jeffrey Burson offers an essay on Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier as “An Enlightened Anti-Philosophe” whose life epitomizes “sometimes amicable, sometimes hostile interaction” within a scholarly community that was becoming increasingly polarized. Caroline Chopelin-Blanc analyzes Adrien Lamouette in France as an “Unconventional Revolutionary and Reformer” who believed his vocation was “that of establishing an evangelical Christianity on earth through ‘Christian democracy’” (122). Carolina Armenteros analyzes Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais as a “firebrand” untramontane royalist who ended his career as “a radical democrat and champion of socialism” (145). Nobody fits any easy categories in this book, and many have a “black legend” attached to their memory (115). Ulrich L. Lehner notes that Benedict Stattler, even though he worked zealously against the anti-Christian metaphysics of Immanuel Kant and thus has been heaped with the anti-Enlighteners, was instead an “enlightened conservative” promoting “the reinvention of Catholic Theology” with the help of the Silesian Protestant Christian Wolff.

“Where,” asks Ritchie Robertson in his essay on “Johann Pezzl (1756–1823): Enlightenment in the Satirical Mode,” “are we to place Pezzl on the map of the Catholic Enlightenment?” Robertson answers: “He undoubtedly belongs on the outside left” (243). Most of the book's authors, however, are less willing to place their subjects so precisely on a cultural map (243). Certainly all the subjects are eccentric to some extent. Thomas O'Connor's essay on Luke Joseph Hooke presents him as doubly eccentric in that he not only lost his job as professor at the Sorbonne when his orthodoxy was questioned, he was also from Ireland, the “European Catholic periphery,” from “the fringes” where social values and theology were a challenge to “the Catholic heartland” (371). Niccolò Guasti describes the Italian Antonio Genovesi, a logician and economist, as having an “eclectic method,” and most of the subjects analyzed in the book are creatively eclectic (283). Gabriel Glickman describes Andrew Michael Ramsay, in an essay subtitled “Catholic Freethinking and Enlightened Mysticism,” as “unstinting in his eclecticism” (391). Many of the people studied are deeply embedded in spiritual disciplines along with intellectual pursuits. One of the most interesting essays is Massimo Mazzotti's “Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799): Science and Mysticism” which presents her as a Filosofesse who devoured textbooks such as Newtonianism for Ladies (1737) by Francesco Algarotti and participated in the philosophical and mathematical conversazione at the palazzo Agnesi. Mazzoti offers a method of understanding her by focusing on her role in conversation with the clergymen and scholars who made her home into a “domestic academy.” Others have described her as a “psychological enigma,” and the old historiographical framework of war between science and religion made her “ultimately incomprehensible” (293). Mazzoti, however, gives her flesh and blood by analyzing her lay spirituality, illuminating her role in conversation with her intellectual peers, and situates her in an Italian tradition of Filosofesse (303–304).

Jesuits and Jansenists play only a background role in most of these essays. On the other hand, Andrea J. Smidt uses the life of the civic humanist Josep Climenti i Avinent during the Enlightened reign of Carlos III in Spain, to show how philo-Jansenism, with its less optimistic view of human nature, actually promoted a “critical common sense” that ultimately makes the Jansenists and Climenti i Avinent “authentic harbingers of the modern world” (346). Jonathan A. Wright takes up the Jesuit perspective in his essay on Ruggiero Bocovich who reflected “the multifarious nature of the society's intellectual identity” (354). Wright calls Bocovich a “maverick” who is difficult “to locate” in the broad “intellectual currents” of the Catholic Enlightenment (361, 363). At the end of the essay, Bocovich, we are reminded, was “a decidedly idiosyncratic man” (366).

Burson and Lehner have wrangled together an excellent collection of mavericks and eclectics, conservative-leftists and ambivalent-dogmatists. All of the subjects rub against the rails of any tidy definition of Catholic thought in the long eighteenth century. In the historical profession there is always the need to categorize, generalize, and philosophize, but the greatest strength of the profession is its humanistic bent to listen to individuals and allow, as much as possible, for individuals to be individual. It is necessarily part of our job to impose top-down meaning onto dead people's lives; however, the authors in this collection have done an excellent job in helping the profession have a bottom-up sense of the “Catholic Enlightenment.”