A year ago, at the annual meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies, a friend and I passed the book display table and noticed Margaret Jacob's The Secular Enlightenment. My friend's initial reaction was telling: “Wow, how far we've come.” Indeed, not long ago the inclusion of “secular” as a modifier for “Enlightenment” would have been utterly redundant. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Hazard, and Peter Gay all identified the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement whose main provenance was the secularizing impulse that had existed since the Renaissance. Yet over the past forty to fifty years, the fundamental association of the Enlightenment with secularism has been modified and nuanced in many significant ways. It is arguably more common now to see the word “Enlightenment” paired with “Catholic,” “religious,” or “moderate,” than with “secular.” In this way, Jacob's book marks a return to a more traditional understanding of the Enlightenment's contributions to “secular modernity” but with important and useful additions.

Jacob argues that the Enlightenment “vastly expanded the sphere of the secular, making it, for increasing numbers of educated people, a primary frame of reference.” By “secular,” Jacob means many things, all of which seem to fall back on an “attachment to the world” and “to a life lived without constant reference to God” (1). To be secular was not only an intellectual position—wherein people no longer attributed answers for fundamental questions, such as the means of existence and the purpose of life, to a transcendent God—but also a lived experience. It meant conforming oneself to a certain notion of modern time, participating in nonreligious social organizations, and advocating for humanitarian and democratic political causes. In her first chapter, Jacob claims that the Enlightenment arose in urban environments and as an “unintended consequence of commercial and state-sponsored expansion” including European colonization (10). Cities opened up new secular spaces for social relations, providing alternatives to religious forums. In chapter two, Jacob argues that over the course of the eighteenth century a new “secular understanding of time” came to replace a Christian system that affirmed the earth as six thousand years old and marked the calendar year by way of saints’ days and other religious holidays (34). Chapter three provides case studies of the ways that ordinary women and men of the eighteenth century “lived” the types of secular lives described in the opening chapters. The book then shifts to a more geographic focus in which Jacob describes the Secular Enlightenment in a variety of European hot spots: Paris and the Low Countries, Scotland, Berlin and Vienna, and finally Naples and Milan. The final chapter focuses on the last decade of the eighteenth century and the ways that the Secular Enlightenment culminated in the revolutionary movements of the 1790s—though with the notable omission of the Haitian Revolution.

Jacob herself acknowledges that her book stands in a “lineage that goes back to the writings of Ernst Cassirer . . . Peter Gay, Franco Venturi, Daniel Roche, and John Marshall,” but she does not simply repeat their narratives (5). The strength of her book lies in the ways that she supplements this classic narrative of secularization with anecdotes drawn from a much deeper social history. Her descriptions of the lives of the “gentleman tourist” Henry Penruddocke Wyndham, the English chaplain Samuel Dickenson, the radical author Isabella de Moerloose, and others introduce new voices into the Enlightenment conversation and make a compelling case for the way that the Enlightenment transformed the daily lives of people beyond that cast of philosophes that we generally associate with the movement. She includes dimensions of analysis overlooked by previous generations of scholars including the ways that the Enlightenment drew attention to and opened up spaces for homosexual communities in Europe. Jacob is at her finest, however, when she connects the important contributions that women made to the secularizing effort. Fascinating stories abound including those of the widow Stockdorff, a seller of pornographic and materialist books, and the educated Elise Reimarus who supplied Gotthold Ephraim Lessing with radical texts. Jacob includes a wealth of anecdotes drawn from a career studying the social and intellectual histories of early modern Europe.

The main victim of the Secular Enlightenment, in Jacob's telling, is the Catholic Church. Protestants are often linked with the promotion of secularism. From Quakers who shared abolitionist sentiments with many of the figures Jacob highlights to Whig Presbyterians who “dominated enlightened culture” in Scotland, Protestants appear somehow adaptive to the transformations that the Secular Enlightenment brought about (126). By contrast, the Catholic Church features as a foil to the work of the proponents of the Enlightenment. Jacob frequently highlights the repressive measures of Catholic censors, the Inquisition, and the papacy. Although Jacob makes note of the existence of a Catholic Enlightenment, her argument undervalues the many ways that Catholic clergymen and women participated in the very transformations that she describes in the eighteenth century. Besides the many examples highlighted by Ulrich Lehner in his recent The Catholic Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2016), one might also point to theologians whose debates, Alan Kors has argued, contributed to the rise of atheism in France. To highlight another example, Jesuit missionaries’ discoveries of Chinese histories and chronologies—chronologies that went well past the normative timeline of the world as understood by most Christians in Europe before the eighteenth century—sparked questions about the reliability of the Bible as a source for understanding human time. The modern secular time that Jacob pinpoints as a center piece of the Secular Enlightenment owed much to the work of Catholic clerics.

Omissions of this sort, however, are to be expected in a work as far-reaching as this. Jacob has provided a useful update to a classic thesis about secularization, and her inclusion of many more voices than featured in the works of Gay, Cassirer, and others makes her study of the Enlightenment far better adapted to today. The Secular Enlightenment is beautifully written and concise, and the stories it includes will surely entertain and educate.