These two edited collections are instances of the established and productive exploration of the relationship between religion and enlightenment during the long eighteenth century in Europe and North America. New approaches is an avowedly thematically and disciplinary varied collection. Its fourteen chapters examine how ‘the Enlightenment’ informed religious belief and practice and vice-versa. The volume has a complicated backstory. The contributions were originally intended for publication in the journal Religion and the Age of Enlightenment. However, its publisher, AMS Press, ceased activity in 2017 following the death of its editor-in-chief, the enthusiastic patron of eighteenth-century studies, Gabriel Hornstein. McInelly and Kerry have done honourable work in getting this collection through the press. The quality of chapters, no doubt because they have gone through a journal-standard peer-review, is high for an edited collection. All are worthwhile reading for specialists interested in their specific fields. Yet the volume's origin is noticeable: this is an expanded journal issue. The chapters are highly diverse – ranging from Milton and Dryden on biblical interpretation to the discourse of civil religion in the work of M. M. Kheraskov to British caricatures of the ’45 Rebellion. Though this diversity demonstrates the fecundity of studying the religious aspects of the Enlightenment, the collection speaks less to wider questions of how this study is to be pursued or its broader consequences. It is a volume more likely to be dipped into than read cover to cover, but there are nuggets of gold within – one to recommend to the university library.

The contributors to Let there be enlightenment, by contrast, aim to make larger claims about how we should now think about ‘the Enlightenment’ given the recent ‘religious turn’. The collection positions itself as overturning influential secular readings of ‘the Enlightenment’. It does this through both stressing the extent to which Enlightened thought was indebted to earlier ancient and Christian thinking and how the language of ‘Enlightenment’ was used as much by Christian as non-Christian authors. Howard Hotson's learned opening chapter focuses on the seventeenth-century Czech scholar Jan Amos Comenius. The latter penned neglected proto-enlightened accounts of a future age of light brought about by all the developments subsequently celebrated during the eighteenth century, such as the invention of print. Matytsin's short chapter examines the similarities and differences in the ways in which irreligious philosophers and religious thinkers spoke about the role of reason in bringing about enlightenment. The rhetoric of light and progress is utilised and debated by many, and one important historical goal is to explore the content of that debate.

Céline Spector's chapter aims to locate the emergence of self-reflexive awareness that eighteenth-century individuals were living through a new epoch in human history. She advances the claim that French literary culture started to use the phrase ‘century of lights’ – understood here as equivalent to ‘the Enlightenment’ – at the precise moment that the same culture spoke of the ‘tribunal of public opinion’. Darrin M. McMahon's interesting if disjointed contribution looks at the literal history of illumination, that is public lighting, during the long eighteenth century and the literature that developed surrounding it. Jo van Cauter's chapter explores Spinoza's concept of piety in the context of his relations with early Quakers. Doing so demonstrates Spinoza's awareness of the inevitability of appeals to divine inspiration and the role of the state in steering such individuals onto a socially beneficial course. Philippe Buc's short chapter explores the semantics of light and darkness in medieval discourse to help clarify its subsequent usage in Enlightenment discourse.

The chapters by Matthew T. Gaetano and Edelstein explore themes relating to Aristotelianism. Gaetano's well-written chapter warns against reductionist claims about the nature of eighteenth-century scholasticism. Evincing more than supine Aristotelianism, Gaetano's three exemplary Italian scholastics position themselves as open to new arguments and new evidence. Edelstein explores how Aristotle's works informed enlightened thought and claims that Aristotle ‘served less as a foil than as a model for the philosophes’ (p. 188). Edelstein uses both qualitative and quantitative measures to support his claims, though occasionally his arguments for Aristotle's importance – as Edelstein admits – rely upon similarities of argument only. The chapter is more thought-provoking than persuasive, but valuable all the more.

William J. Bulman resurrects the older political theory interpretation of the Enlightenment as a post-1648 development. European elites, convinced of the need to curtail religious fanaticism, focused on the problems of securing ‘civil peace and worldly flourishing’ (p. 206). Specifically, Bulman discusses Anglican divines who offered, in their attempts to solve these problems, ‘Enlightened arguments for priestcraft’ (p. 207). Jeffrey Burson's chapter explores the usage of ‘enlightenment’, ‘to enlighten’ and so on within five differing discursive fields – Jansenism, Jesuitism, Freemasonry, the anti-philosophes and materialist philosophy. Burson recommends that a richer history of eighteenth-century intellectual culture might examine these competing genealogies over what constituted enlightenment.

Charly Coleman's jargon-heavy chapter examines Denis Diderot's commentary on the dream state as a case study of the ‘multiple intersections between spiritualism and materialism’ (p. 250). Coleman shows how dreaming, sleepwalking and other nocturnal behaviours provided an interpretative challenge to the philosophes' emphasis on the ‘active, wakeful, self-owning subject’ (p. 255). James Schmidt completes the collection by examining the ways in which images of enlightenment were being contested at the moment that ‘the Enlightenment’ entered into a struggle with oppositional tendencies. This is familiar terrain for Schmidt, but he does present interesting observations on how the concept of the ‘counter-enlightenment’ is ‘increasingly useless’ (p. 285) when used to describe a coherent body of thought.

The contributions to Let there be enlightenment are stimulating rather than conclusive. In attempting to draw out the larger methodological significance of their claims, they are well worth reading. Several interpretative points are repeated. The death knell has surely sounded for ‘Manichean’ (p. 4) accounts of the Enlightenment as constituting the victory of reason over religion. Moreover, narrow definitions of what counts as ‘the Enlightenment’ should be replaced by more capacious notions which mirror eighteenth-century debates over the process of being enlightened. Indeed, the eighteenth-century battles over the correct understanding of this process of enlightenment are the key area for productive future research. Every time we discuss a body of radical or irreligious thought articulating an ‘enlightened’ position on reason and religion, it is very likely we will find opposing group(s) of religious thinkers trying to offer a rival account but using similarly ‘enlightened’ ideas and arguments. What will be gained is a richer, more complex account of the intellectual and cultural life of the long eighteenth century – it might even be the case that ‘the Enlightenment’ is jettisoned as a concept unable to reflect such cacophony.

Let there be enlightenment, then, is a thoughtful, consistently high-quality, important and engaging collection. Reviews in academic journals are mediums for thinking out loud. This book is a frustrating one to read cover to cover. The contributors repeatedly present themselves as arguing against Jonathan Israel's dominant, influential account about ‘the Enlightenment’. Arguably, this confuses influence with prominence – certainly during this reviewer's training in enlightenment studies, it was the ‘religious Enlightenment’ which was dominant. Indeed, this collection reads like a statement of current interpretative orthodoxy masquerading as innovation. The dominant geographical focus is eighteenth-century France and it is for other researchers to assess the applicability of the larger interpretative suggestions. The claims that enlightened thinking owes something to earlier concepts and rhetoric is a truism – indeed, it is debatable whether persuasive argument is possible without some shared understandings of the concepts being used – though the fact that it needs to be said indicates the extent to which earlier scholarship has fallen for the philosophes’ self-narration of their achievements.

Reading Let there be enlightenment cover to cover, like much Enlightenment scholarship at present, involves the voluntary endurance of sustained cognitive dissonance. Each chapter has its own sense of what ‘the Enlightenment’ was. Read them separately and this is no problem. Read several chapters in a row, each with a different definition and set of criteria about what ‘the Enlightenment’ is, and things get trickier. This is especially the case when chronologies undermine each other (for example, Hotson and Edelstein) or definitions of ‘Enlightenment’ are strikingly different to those of everyone else in the collection (for example, Bulman and the rest). One path out of cognitive dissonance in Enlightenment studies is to claim that there is no longer any coherence to discussion of ‘the Enlightenment’. From there you can either give up or retreat to a narrow definition that only you will use. Another is to praise the growing nuance, richness and historical sensitivity of new research, accept that overall assessments are impossible and (usually) retreat to one's own silo of expertise. Certainly, the interpretations of ‘the Enlightenment’ that we have now are thoroughly superior to those that we had in the 1960s. Conversely, the cultural turn's focus on how people at the time understood their world – of which ‘religious Enlightenment’ scholarship can be seen as one instance – results in a notion of ‘the Enlightenment’ so watered-down that it seems destined to become a synonym for ‘long eighteenth-century culture’. This may not be a bad thing.