This is a feast for scholars and students intrigued by the outsize influence of the inspired shoemaker in modern Western philosophy, theology and culture. Over twenty-three chapters and 492 pages, this collection of essays documents instances of reception spanning a geographic range from Moscow to Chicago, and a chronological range from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. It illustrates strikingly the powerful appeal of Bӧhme’s thought across a multiplicity of contexts.

The title of the book is consequently overly modest, as the essays cover far more than just three worlds. The editors seek to group the essays into three spheres, lightly referencing Bӧhme’s ‘three Worlds’ (the spiritual light and dark worlds, and creation or nature): for the purposes of structuring the volume, these ‘worlds’ are eastern and central Europe; the Netherlands; and Britain. This organisation results in slightly unbalanced sections: four essays on Britain, five on the Netherlands and eleven on central-eastern Europe, which encompass the reception in the German lands but also – rewardingly – Poland, Scandinavia, Estonia, Transylvania and Russia. It is a minor structural flaw, and taken together the essays provide a wonderful, distinctive expansion of our understanding of this remarkable and sometimes vexed reception history which, as Scott Brown’s concluding chapter on the ‘peculiar case’ of the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick indicates, is still unfolding.

The collection is a rich treasury for researchers, and the fifty-page bibliography, with an unparalleled list of archival references, is alone worth the cost of the hardcover; another glory is the magnificent plates. Leading Böhme scholars, including the editors, assemble to shed new light on aspects of this remarkable and sometimes vexed reception history. In the opening chapters by Carlos Gilly, Mike Zuber, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann and Kristine Hannak, the critical role played by two figures – Böhme’s first biographer, the nobleman Abraham von Franckenberg (1593–1652), and the Silesian poet and mystic, Johannes Scheffler (1624–77) – is re-examined. Gilly has tracked down a pre-publication manuscript of Franckenberg’s Bericht on Böhme’s life, which is reproduced photographically in an appendix.

A key observation made in these early chapters is the extent to which Böhme’s mystical texts were received alongside ancient, medieval, radical Reformation and contemporary spiritual writings as ‘a witness among others’ to perennial wisdom: including Tauler, Paracelsus, Schwenckfeld, Castellio, Arndt, Weigel, the Jesuit Sandaeus and a host of contemporary lay prophets or ‘wonder men’. His individual significance for Franckenberg and Scheffler is appropriately put into proportion, but the question presses itself on the reader all the more strongly as to why it was Böhme’s challenging, opaque texts – so deeply rooted in the alchemical and hermetic literature of the post-Renaissance – which endured as by far the most influential legacy of his generation of lay visionaries.

Many of the essays which follow helpfully reconstruct the mechanics of dissemination and distribution, providing a painstaking account of the means by which Bӧhme’s thought penetrated into so many diverse contexts. Leigh Penman uncovers the context for the publication of the eight-volume Toruń edition of Bӧhme’s works in the early 1650s, which defined the reception in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Another fascinating and unfamiliar environment for the dissemination and promotion of Bӧhme’s works alongside other spiritualist works, the trade route through the Carpathian Basin, is brought to light by Tünde Beatrix Karnitscher’s brief but splendid contribution (pp. 141–50). The chapter by Pāivi Mehtonen itemises the Swedish and Finnish manuscripts containing Bӧhme translations before 1809, and richly illustrates the ‘complex, multi-confessional reception’ (p. 157) of these texts as ‘underground literature’, politically and religiously subversive under Lutheran orthodoxy. Witalij Morosow highlights the neglected contribution of the Martinist Semjon Gamaleja to the Russian translation of Bӧhme’s works. Part ii, with engaging essays by Viktoria Franke, Sybille Rusterholz, Frank van Lamoen and Lennart Gard, is dedicated to examining the interpersonal relations, correspondence networks and chiliastic themes which animated Bӧhme’s radical reception in the Netherlands, especially around the Angelic Brethren founded by Johann George Gichtel (1638–1710). Ariel Hessayon’s chapter in part iii demonstrates his command of the key phase of English translation and publication of the Bӧhme corpus between 1645 and 1662.

Each of these contributions addresses the higher level questions, not just considering how Bӧhme was received, but also why. Hessayon explains the aim of the English translators in terms of the settlement of controversies and unitive spiritual reform; for others, such as Gichtel (as Rusterholz explores at pp. 239–51), the appeal lay in Bӧhme’s account of enlightenment or the recovery of primordial wisdom, and his emphasis on Theosophia practica over historical or dogmatic religion.

Other chapters apply laser focus to a particular instance of reception, offering insight into the sometimes paradoxical appropriations of Bӧhme’s thought, and its susceptibility to being radicalised or politicised. These include the excellent essays by Aira Vӧse amd Mait Laas on nineteenth-century Estonian patriotic literature (pp. 169–88), and by Jan Rohls and Thomas Isermann on Quirinus Kuhlmann (pp. 95–124), the messianic prophets whose peregrinations finally led him to the stake in Moscow. Chapters by Aleksandr Gaisin, Christian Hengstermann, Amir Saifullin and a second chapter by Jan Rohls draw attention to creative adaptations of and ambivalent reactions to Bӧhme’s system by particular figures: Vladimir Solovyov, Henry More, John Pordage and Robert Fludd.

One gentle critical observation would be that male interpreters are far more prominent in the book than the important ‘wonder women’ inspired by Böhme, such as Jane Lead and Johanna Eleonora Peterson. It is none the less true that we are introduced to some unfamiliar women influenced by his theosophy, among them the patriotic nineteenth-century Estonian poet Lydia Koidula, and a housekeeper, Annetje van Vliet, whose obstinate piety proved an annoyance to the celibate Angelic Brethren of Leiden in the 1690s. Like many published conference proceedings (the contributions arise from a series of international conferences held between 2019 and 2022), the collection has an eclectic feel, and does not aim at comprehensive coverage. A complete reception history would fill many volumes. This collection offers many fresh and fertile directions for scholarship of Western esotericism, Protestant radicalism and mysticism in European intellectual and religious history.