In this engagingly written book, Rita Krueger takes a new look at Bohemia's eighteenth-century nobility, beginning with the careful debunking of one of the Czech nationalist foundational myths: she asserts that the native aristocracy was neither decimated nor exiled in the aftermath of the imperial Habsburg army's defeat of the protestant-dominated Bohemian Estates at the Battle of White Mountain in 1618. What follows is an analysis of the progressive aristocracy's role in the expansion of the public sphere through the foundation of various cultural and scientific organizations. These organizations were sites of provincial sociability in contrast to the imperial court in Vienna, and they reflected tension between the imperial capital and the provinces in the second half of the eighteenth century, especially as a result of reforming-absolutist Emperor Joseph II's centralizing policies. They were also sites of aristocratic-bourgeois interaction: Krueger points out that many of the early Czech “national awakeners,” including František Palacký, had served as tutors in aristocratic households.

This book is also in part an intellectual biography of Count Kaspar Sternberg, a prominent Bohemian aristocrat, whose manor house on the family estate at Radnitz became a center for scientific undertaking and scholarly activity in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Sternberg began his career in the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, but retired during the Napoleonic wars and later became an important paleobiologist and a founding member in 1818 of what is today the National Museum in Prague, which would house not only his botanical collection and library, but also the collections of his older brother, Joachim. The National Museum built a collection that was meant to provide evidence of Bohemia's “timeless” existence and proud heritage.

Kaspar Sternberg kept apartments near the Sternberg Palace in Prague, long maintaining close relations with its occupant, his cousin Francis, who himself played an important role in the foundation of numerous artistic, cultural, and scientific organizations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, including the Society for Patriotic Friends of the Arts in 1796, later the National Gallery. This organization, meant to provide the aesthetic and educational environment needed to nurture the talented, helped to create a permanent art collection for public display in Prague. Francis Sternberg, among others, exhibited his large collection there for the benefit of the public. It is, however, the fate of the Czernin art collection, which was then in the hands of Francis Sternberg's brother-in-law, Johann Rudolf Czernin, that Krueger discusses to exemplify the transition from aristocratic collection for private consumption to art collection for public edification, which was part of the growth of public art museums in other European lands. Like the National Museum, the National Gallery buttressed the claim to Bohemia's cultural-intellectual place among European states and served as a site of debates with political implications.

Krueger also discusses other transformations of space, among them the creation of new gardens and the transition of Prague's royal hunting preserve to Stromovka Park, which were made accessible to more than aristocrats, as well as the construction of the Nostitz Theater in Prague, whose patriotic patron, Francis Anton Nostitz, hoped to provide Bohemia with an appropriate site for public performances of international drama and opera, above all German. This volume is filled with many interesting vignettes, including Kaspar Sternberg's construction of a temple monument to the astronomer Johannes Kepler. These fascinating details reflect Krueger's assiduous research in numerous archives in Austria and the Czech Republic.

In the last chapter, Krueger seeks to connect the cultural and intellectual developments she so effectively analyzes in the earlier chapters of the book to the events of 1848. Throughout the 1840s, progressive aristocrats were able to help to foster the growth of cultural and intellectual life in the stagnant atmosphere of Metternichian Austria. Some members of the estates had sought reform during the 1840s, but these attempts were overtaken in 1848 by the revolutionary actions of those not represented in the estates. Hereafter, the leadership of the developing Czech political nationalist movement would be in the hands of nonaristocrats.

This volume adds to our understanding of Czech aristocratic-intellectual life in an era of crucial cultural, political, and social change in Europe from the Enlightenment through the 1848 Revolution. Krueger's analysis of the activities of a number of progressive nobles demonstrates that they not only responded to change, in some cases, but they also initiated it, making important contributions, for example, to the professionalization of science and technology as well as encouraging work on history and linguistics. As she notes, art museums and scientific institutions both have their origins in earlier traditions of aristocratic and royal collecting. In its careful examination of the Bohemian transition from a traditional society of orders to a modern, nationalizing nineteenth-century society, this book makes contributions to the history of the Bohemian Lands, and the Habsburg Monarchy as well as to the late Enlightenment, the French Revolutionary era, and the formation of modern Europe.

The book, however, suffers from several shortcomings. Greater use of some of the more recent work on nationalism in the Bohemian lands, especially Eagle Glassheim's study, Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian Aristocracy (2005), might have improved it. The bibliography is dated, reflecting the relatively long period between the completion of the dissertation and the publication of the monograph. Moreover, the rendering of Bohemian place names is inconsistent: sometimes a name appears in Czech, sometimes in German, and sometimes in both languages with no explanation. There is also a lack of precision: Prague's world-famous university, long claimed by both Czech- and German-speakers, is rendered both as the University of Prague and Prague University, rather than as Charles University. In addition, Vlastenecké muzeum (Prague's national museum) might have been more effectively translated as “Patriotic” rather than the more Germanic “Fatherland's” Museum. Finally, the book's index does not do justice to the richness of its contents: Kaspar Steinberg's mother, the well-educated Anna-Josepha, born Kolowrat-Krakovský, a devotee both of the French Enlightenment philosophes and the German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe, is discussed at least three times in the text, but finds no place in the index.