This succinct and insightful study discusses a specific genre of the Josephinian Enlightenment, the reviews of sermons established in Prague as the Geißel der Prediger (literally “the scourge of preachers”) but carried on with even more panache and success in Vienna from 1782 to 1784 under the title Wöchentliche Wahrheiten (“weekly truths”), with “truth” pressing ahead not in battalions, but being rather served in bite-sized bits and pieces on a weekly basis. Run by Leopold Alois Hoffmann, later much maligned for his elasticity in adapting to Francis II's reputedly reactionary regime, the periodical had a clear-cut objective. All varieties of arts and letters were subjected to the tribunal of public opinion. Preachers had formerly not had to run this gauntlet, but this was what the series of reviews changed. The weekly seemed timely and topical, particularly because the quality of homiletics was a source of increasing dismay as Josephinian Catholicism enlisted the clergy as moral guardians of their flock, responsible for making the members of the congregation good citizens and people.

After Leslie Bodi's vivid thumbnail sketch (in Tauwetter in Wien [Frankfurt, 1979]) and B. M. Hoppe's thorough 1989 monograph on the journal (Predigtkritik im Josephinismus [St. Ottilien, 1989]), Ulrike K. Freitag stresses one salient but hitherto overlooked aspect of its activities: the scathing criticism leveled against the language used on the pulpit. Dialect was singled out for particular opprobrium, but so were orotund and profligate use of Latin (buntschäkkiger Wörterkram, 65, 182) and recondite exegetical digressions. At its best, a sermon should not contain rabble-rousing harangues or ribaldry, but be temperate, modest, and come with a well-crafted moral lesson (the Popularität invoked by Hoffmann). Predictably, the effusions of Viennese preachers were found wanting.

Freitag devotes less attention than one might have expected to the issue of style as imagined by the enlightened critics: A comparison between the Viennese and the Prague journals with their markedly different challenges of polyglot church audiences and language purgation might have been revealing, as would a closer look at possible disparities in their Gottschedian aesthetical agendas (the Prague editors and authors of the journal all moved in Karl Heinrich Seibt's orbit). It would also have been illuminating to chart briefly whether the criticism of the clergy as spreading “unreformed” language remained an aspect of Austrian anticlericalism in the nineteenth century. Freitag, however, squarely focuses on dialect, its syntactic and lexical aspects, its pronunciation and morphology. She does not quite clarify to what extent sermons were extemporized or followed a written script. Freitag also seems to allot too high a degree of authenticity to the journal's verbatim sketches of sermons delivered, which allows her to infer conclusions on “the” Viennese dialect of the time. Contemporary complaints in the journal about the distortions and polemical hyperbole—a point raised in letters to the editors and in brochures more than once—would suggest a more cautious assessment.

Freitag gives a good account of the foil-fencing over the Wöchentliche Wahrheiten and provides a very useful transcription of the arguably most fascinating riposte to the reviews, the dialect pamphlet by the “Fleischhackermeister” Bartlme Uhatzi, the master butcher of Vösendorf near Vienna. This, it seems, was the nom de plume of Joseph Pochlin, teacher of geistliche Beredsamkeit (pastoral rhetoric) at the archiepiscopal seminary, who lashed out against the suspicious scribblers taking notes during the sermon and sneering and grimacing like the “Jews who mocked our Lord.” Notwithstanding the mentioned reservations, Freitag's is an appealing and eminently readable study whose first chapters can also be recommended as introductory reading to the problems of linguistic change and the clergy's status in late-eighteenth-century Vienna.