[Book Review] Enlightened monks : the German Benedictines, 1740-1803

Abstract

Book Review for Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines, 1740-1803. By Ulrich L. Lehner, Oxford U.P., 2011, ISBN 9780199595129. Ulrich Lehner has written a book that anyone with an interest in eighteenth-century Catholicism and the more general phenomenon of religious Enlightenment will want to read. Focused on the roughly 150 monasteries (composed of some 3500-4000 professed monks) in the German-speaking Benedictine communities of southern and Middle Germany, Austria, and Switzerland over the course of the eighteenth century, the book draws on extensive primary research in local and regional archives as well as the very best of contemporary scholarship in German and English.