This volume brings together for the first time case studies on secularists of the 19th and early 20th centuries in national and transnational perspectives including examples from all over Europe. Its focus is on freethinkers taken as secular avant-gardes and early promoters of secularity. The authors of this book deal with multiple historical, religious, social, and cultural backgrounds and, in these contexts, analyze freethinkers' organizations, projects, networks, and contributions to forming a secular worldview, in particular, the promotion of concrete undertakings such as civil baptism or initiatives to leave church. Next to this secularist agenda, the contributions also take into account ambivalences and difficulties freethinkers were faced with, namely, the tensions between a national self-image and the transnational direction the movement has taken; the regional base of many projects and their transregional horizon; freethinkers' cultural programs and their immanent political mission; and the dialogue with respectively the conceptual distinction from other secularist groups. Readers interested in the history of secularity will learn that it was a heterogeneous enterprise already in its beginnings. This set the course for later European and global developments.

A corrective to the much-discussed Victorian `crisis of faith', this study focuses upon several prominent individuals who experienced a `crisis of doubt' and made the reverse journey, abandoning secularism to defend Christianity. Their stories demonstrate the intellectual strength of faith in the nineteenth century.

This is the first academic biography of the scientist and politician Jacob Moleschott (1822-1893). Based on a vast range of primary sources in German, Italian, Dutch, French, and Latin, it not only sheds new light on the history of materialism in the natural sciences, but also shows the deep entanglement of science, politics, and popularization in 19th-century Europe. Applying new methods from cultural history and the history of science, Laura Meneghello focuses on processes of knowledge circulation, transnational mobility, and the role of translation in 19th-century science.

Die Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients erscheinen als Supplement der Zeitschrift Der Islam, gegründet 1910 von Carl Heinrich Becker, einem der Väter der modernen Islamwissenschaft. Ganz im Sinne Beckers ist das Ziel der Studien die Erforschung der vergangenen Gesellschaften des Vorderen Orients, ihrer Glaubenssysteme und der zugrundeliegenden sozialen und ökonomischen Verhältnisse, von der Iberischen Halbinsel bis nach Zentralasien, von den ukrainischen Steppen zum Hochland des Jemen. Über die grundlegende philologische Arbeit an der literarischen Überlieferung hinaus nutzen die Studien die archivalischen, sowie materiellen und archäologischen Überlieferungen als Quelle für die gesamte Bandbreite der historisch arbeitenden Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften.

This volume explores the cultural, political, and intellectual forces that helped define nineteenth-century British Christianity. Larsen challenges many of the standard assumptions about Victorian-era Christians in their attempts to embody and their theological commitments. He highlights the way in which Dissenters and other free church Evangelicals employed the full range of theological resources available to them to take stands that the wider culture was still resisting - e.g., evangelical nonconformists enfranchising women, siding with the black population of Jamaica in opposition to their own colonial governor, championing the rights of Jews, Roman Catholics, and atheists. These stances belie the stereotypes of Victorian Evangelicals currently in existence and properly shift the focus to Dissent, to plebeian culture, to social contexts, and to the cultural and political consequences of theological commitments. This study brings freshness and verve to the study of religion and the Victorians, bearing fruit in a range of significant findings and connections.