The author has indefatigably worked his way through mounds of archived eighteenth-century printed correspondence, books, and tracts to make available an impressive amount of information, including many very interesting anecdotes, for which one is immensely grateful. As a general explication of the influence of the Enlightenment among German Benedictines, however, the book disappoints.

Ulrich Lehner arranges his material under nine headings: history-writing, monastic daily life, rights and liberty within the monastery, new means of scholarly communication, monastery prisons, runaway monks, enlightened law, enlightened philosophy, and enlightened theology, arguing in each area for Enlightenment-inspired developments.

Chapter 2 (history writing) begins with the “German Maurists” who continued conventional monastic history writing but, as it were, set the table for a new acceptance of change (that is, the Enlightenment). The third chapter, “Challenge of a New Lifestyle,” documents loosened strictures on individual stipends, use of tobacco, degrees of privacy in living arrangements, sartorial practices and so forth. Chapter 4, “Challenge of a New Liberty,” extends this to a loosening of stabilitas and claustration and the claiming of “rights” by monks vis-à-vis their superiors.

Lehner should have more thoroughly examined just how monastically new all these things were. Some monks had always, over more than a millennium, come into conflict with superiors and appealed to canon law and monastic legislation for their rights. Trends toward laxity in dress, private stipends, living quarters, and so forth had waxed and waned over many centuries of monastic decadence and reform. For centuries monks led in the construction of scholarly networks, yet Lehner's chapter 5 considers it an Enlightenment innovation. How much of the documentary evidence Lehner has uncovered represents an Enlightenment-stimulated novum cannot be answered without setting the German Bendictine eighteenth century into its millennial context, a task too large for one scholar and one book. But Lehner might have shown greater awareness of this issue.

In many ways this book is a series of vignettes of intellectuals, favoring the radicals who moved well outside the Catholic tradition especially after 1750 and bookended with some more moderate examples of reformers who stayed within the tradition. The moderates serve also as foils to a handful of anti-Enlightener Benedictines—explained away as being under the influence of French anti-Enlightenment philosophes (6) and as “reactionary insofar as they only defended old privileges and traditions but did not acknowledge the plurality of contemporary values and the necessity for society reforms” (7, emphasis added). Aware of how dependent his thesis about a strong Enlightenment impulse in German Benedictine circles is upon a handful of individual vignettes, Lehner urges his reader to assume a silent body of timid monks who agreed with the vignetted Enlighteners but were afraid to speak out (6).

One of the anti-Enlighteners was Meinrad Widmann. Lehner first cites Protestant reviewers of Widmann's two-volume book—who dismissed it as an “ignorant and sinister attack on any modernization of the Church”—then quotes Widmann's own assertions that the Enlightenment was to be rejected because it fundamentally undermined Christian and Catholic beliefs and culture (7–8), implying that we all know that such a response has to have been exaggerated and reactionary, a sinister attack on the True Good of Modernization of the Church. Lehner adds one or two more “anti-Enlightenment” figures (8–9) and with that, we are done with the benighted foils and ready for the heroes of the morality tale.

But this reviewer found himself, by the time he got to chapter 10 on theology, asking whether Benedict Werkmeister, introduced briefly in chapter 4 as an unabashed defender even of the French Revolution, does not vindicate Widmann. Do not Werkmeister and the others portrayed in chapter 10 in fact reduce Christianity to a kind of Kantian religious moralism that is not even recognizably Deist? Enlightened Monks certainly offers valuable insight into what someone like Werkmeister wanted: a kind of reduction of Catholicism to the internal forum, priority to the state in regulating religious matters but, within the Church, no excommunication for heresy (223). Werkmeister has some interesting arguments against coercion in religion (223), but he also seems to link the very nature of hierarchy with intolerance (224), believing, for instance, that Catholics are more intolerant than others because they are more hierarchical.

The opening pages of chapter 10 are paradigmatic for the book (including the valuable material on philosophy and law in chapters 8 and 9). Lehner describes first a “modest reform theology” drawn from monastic rather than scholastic tradition, exemplified by Abbot Martin Gerbert of St. Blasien. But this serves largely as a foil to the radicals like Jakob Danzer and Benedict Werkmeister. Lehner himself notes that Gerbert was widely accepted among Benedictines through the 1750s. A more evenhanded treatment of “modest reform” trends throughout the book would have been welcome, but that would raise the question of whether a Benedictine Enlightenment actually existed. Is it possible that an incipient reassertion of the Benedictine tradition's own renewal-resources (in theology pointing toward Johann Adam Möhler and the twentieth-century Ressourcement movement,vis-à-vis the reigning scholastic theology) makes radicals like Danzer and Werkmeister into mere outliers when viewed long-term? In this reading, the developments visible in Gerbert were interrupted for a few decades by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars with their devastating effect on Benedictine monasteries, only to reassert themselves both inside and outside nineteenth- and twentieth-century monasticism, leading eventually to the Ressourcement fathers of Vatican II, including the Benedictine Jean Leclercq but also Chenu's work on monastic theology of the twelfth century.

Enlightened Monks will richly reward its reader with information about some larger-than-life characters in Benedictine monasteries in eighteenth-century Germany. However, its assumptions about the White Hats worn by the Enlighteners and the Black Hats of those who resisted them seem to have obscured the possibility of glimpsing the disputes of the mid-eighteenth-century as a conflict between a vital renewal from within the Catholic tradition's own (monastic) resources that eventually bore great fruit, on the one hand, and a rather short-sighted acceptance by a few monks of some rather reductionist eighteenth-century intellectual fads on the other.