In these days of book-banning in America, the we must ask ourselves about the nature of knowledge. Faced with the onslaught of the thought police (who masquerade as elected state legislators), and the evangelicals (who masquerade as true Christians when they are actually just the opposite), one must admit knowledge itself is now in a precarious state.
This important book by Dr. Martin Mulsow (professor of intellectual history, University of Erfurt in Germany) begins by establishing three ways in which knowledge can become precarious. His focus is not on the 21st century, but rather Early Modern Europe (mostly the 17th and 18th centuries). First is the precarious status of certain media of knowledge. For example, if something exists in only one or a few manuscripts, it can easily be lost or destroyed. Second is the precarious status of certain thinkers. By publishing things those in authority regard as offensive, they out their own safety at risk. Their careers can be ruined or, if they are caught in the loving embrace of the Catholic Church, burned at the stake. And third there is the precarious status of certain forms of expression. Those who want to put forward something that is forbidden may resort to writing about in disguise, “for example in a literary fiction or a burlesque.”
Mulsow positions his attack on the multifarious problems inherent in this study as follows. “We need an adequate description of the precarious status of so-called radical Enlightenment thinkers, one that does justice not only to their social situation but also to their intellectual situation and their manner of speech and communication.” As the numbers of such radicals is small, Mulsow is compelled to look at how certain individuals acted. “Their tactics were never simple or uncomplicated,” he writes. In many cases these scholars lived in poverty, some having lost their university jobs for writing uncomfortable truths, some never getting published at all. In a sense, this book is a tribute to their bravery, and by focusing on their plights Mulsow has rescued them from obscurity. This alone is a great service to our understanding of the Enlightenment in the long 18th century.
A case in point is Theodor Ludwig Lau. “As late as 1736, shortly before his death, he published a bibliography of his unprinted works so that at least he could call attention to their existence. When he died in 1740 he took his works with him to the grave. His literary estate remains missing today.” Another scholar, Johann Georg Wachter, did not wish to publish his later works because of the scandal surrounding a book he did publish: a synthesis of Spinoza and the Kabbala. Thus, his works had no influence on the German Enlightenment. Some were carried off to the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, but later returned to the University Library of Hamburg.
Then there are the books that were burned. Johann Heinrich Huebel (1694-1758) became professor of law in Kiel in 1723, but was dismissed the following year after “making a complete mess of his relations “ with his patron, the duke of Holstein. He resolved to compile the Bibliotheca Vulcani, listing and investigating all books that had been burned. This project was so radical it was never completed, and without ducal support doomed to failure. (Hopefully someone will have better luck creating such a book in a few years, after the governors of Texas, Iowa, and other states start burning books instead of just banning them.)
Taking a broader view, Mulsow writes that “An adequate notion of the radical Enlightenment in Germany will need to confront or disperse many paradoxes.” Chief among these are the fact these radical thinkers were even at the courts of German princes; and they also forged an alliance with radical spiritualists, which the author terms a “great contradiction.” Mulsow writes extensively about Lau, who “was playing with thoroughly anarchist and seditious ideas.” For example, he argued in favour of polygamy which, says Mulsow, “was in a long tradition of spiritualist revolts.”
The author uses the case of Giulio Cesar Vanini as a springboard to understand libertinism in Germany. Vanini’s philosophy was considered so subversive and radical, he suffered the ultimate penalty in Toulouse: in 1619 he had his tongue torn out before he was burned to death. The case reverberated through Europe for over a century: a jurist in Hamburg named Peter Arpe published a book in 1712 that exonerated Vanini from the charge of atheism, but “even recent scholars cannot agree on how should read the book.” Was it serious, or was Arpe joking? Mulsow says we “have to understand Arpe’s apology for Vanini if we are to grasp the assimilation and transformation of libertine thinking in the Germany of that time.” Mulsow approaches this issue first by looking at Hamburg, where the collecting of forbidden works quite notable. “The possession of extremely rare books and manuscripts increased one’s social prestige within the Republic of Letters, and it became a precondition for learned correspondence and the exchange of texts.” A Hamburg physician, Christian Lossau, had the largest collection of rare and forbidden books in Germany. “Next to that case of 1,000 works was another containing an even more specialized collection: books that had been publicly burned.” The church was so fond of burning books they even made stoves that looked like a library bookcase! At least one still exists at a museum in Salzburg. The author devotes an entire chapter to the complexities involved in understanding Arpe, and it is quite fascinating.
For all of this book’s strengths, there are a few places where more is needed. On page 186, Mulsow mentions the Italian priest Antonio Rocco (1586-1653, pictured here), a libertine who wrote a satirical homosexual dialogue, Alcibiades the Schoolboy. In a footnote, Mulsow gives a German-language edition of the book, but fails to list an English translation. This is a problem with many books that are published in translation: Mulsow wrote this book in German in 2012, and it was translated into English in 2022 by H.C. Erik Midlefort. Thus, references in German remain, even though English sources do exist.
Furthermore, Mulsow does not mention that only 10 copies of Rocco’s book survived destruction, or that he was a member of the secret organization Academy of the Unknowns, which is discussed on other pages. It is said members of the Academy maintained the “infamous doctrine of double truth: the assertion that something could be true in philosophy while it was false in theology, and vice versa.” (an example of this would have been welcome) Scandalously, members of the Academy “provided an opportunity to be pious if one were prepared to think of combining obscenity with esotericism, sexual desire with a philosophical inclination, and jocular quotations from the Bible with deep seriousness.” In a fascinating investigation, Mulsow concludes that “Venetian libertinism as cultivated by the Unknowns can become a crucial key to and focal point for understanding the way contemporary Venetians dealt with truth.” Mulsow treats libertinism “as a philosophical culture, a composite of discourses and practices that set up the model philosopher over against the model Christian.”
A book of great depth and insightfulness, Knowledge Lost is a must read for anyone interested in the Enlightenment, radical or otherwise.
Knowledge Lost: A New View of Early Modern Intellectual History, is by Princeton University Press. It lists for $39.95.