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396 EMWJ 2013, Vol. 8 Book Reviews Plummer's Work in Archives Gives 396 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Book Reviews Plummer’s work in archives gives voices to the many other women who entered into these precarious and often dangerous unions. In the 1520s, it was far from assured that the Reformation would prevail. Had it failed, such women would have faced just as severe, if not harsher, penalties as their husbands. Anabaptist wives often did share their husbands’ gruesome fates. The final chapter looks at how such marriages developed and were shaped by church and civil policies after the initial transitions of the 1520s. Not surprising, pastors’ families turn out to be strikingly similar to everyone else’s families with discord and strife sometimes as common as love and devotion. Could pastors and their wives divorce? Could pastors continue in their position if they did divorce? What happened to a pastor’s family when he died if their home belonged to the church? How did pas- tor’s families live and function under the scrutiny of ecclesiastical and civil authorities who now examined not just the priest’s propriety but that of the entire family? This is a thoughtful, meticulously researched, and important book. It examines the ways in which the Reformation affected and, in some ways, continues to affect the lives of individual pastors. It also gives voice to the lives, work, and devotion of those pastors’ wives. Too often their wives have remained silent partners in their stories. Plummer’s excavation in a large number of archives across central Germany helps remedy this neglect. David M . Whitford Baylor University Leibniz and the Two Sophies: The Philosophical Correspondence . Ed . and trans . by Lloyd Strickland . Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011 . 468 pp . $37 .00 . ISBN 978-0-7727-2086-3 . This is another very fine publication in the prolific, eminently useful, and distinguished series “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe,” co- edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. Formerly published by the University of Chicago Press (sixty volumes between 1996 and 2010), the series is now housed at the University of Toronto Press under the auspices Book Reviews 397 of Toronto’s Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, and the new co-editor Elizabeth Hageman has developed an English list. Projected at 180 titles altogether, the vast majority of books in the series are authored by women. The present volume, a selection in English translation from the correspondence of Leibniz and Sophia of Hanover and her daughter Sophie Charlotte of Prussia, is especially welcome because it highlights the philosophical interest and contribution of these two learned, aristo- cratic women to philosophical discourse around 1700. Lloyd Strickland, a knowledgeable Leibniz scholar, has put together a very readable, well-orga- nized volume of major passages from the French originals on philosophical ideas ranging from the nature of substance to the idea of divine justice to universal salvation. Electress Sophia of Hanover (1630–1714), the daughter (and twelfth child) of Frederick V, Elector of Palatine, and his wife Elizabeth Stuart, was married to Ernest-Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg, elevated in 1692 to Elector of Hanover. Sophia was as politically astute as she was interested in the arts and in the philosophical discourse of her time, well- read in the works of Descartes, Spinoza, John Toland, and Leibniz, whom she befriended when he was court counselor and librarian at the court in Hanover. Sophia corresponded (and frequently conversed) with Leibniz from 1691 until her death in 1714. Leibniz assisted in securing the British crown for Hanover (the 1701 Act of Settlement excluded any Catholic Stuart lineage) when Sophia, as a Protestant Stuart, was proclaimed heir- ess presumptive of the English throne that shortly after her death fell to her oldest son (of her seven children who reached adulthood). Her son became George I of England. Sophia’s genuine philosophical interests have to be seen in connection with her political stature and dynastic aspirations. For instance, in June 1700 she wrote to Leibniz: I will ask you to think about the dispute my son the Elector [the future George I] had on Thoughts, which, against him [Molanus], my son the Elector maintained are material inas- much as they are composed of things that enter into us through the senses, and inasmuch as one cannot think of anything without making for oneself an idea of things that one has seen, 398 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Book Reviews heard, or tasted, like the blind man who was asked how he imagined God and said “like sugar.” (189) She was referring to a treatise by the influential irenicist Protestant theo- logian Gerhard Wolter Molanus on the soul and its nature. The paper was written at Sophia’s request and defends the Cartesian distinction between the immateriality of minds and their thoughts and the materi- ality of bodies. The controversy over mind and matter lies at the heart of Enlightenment discourse, but the political side of this discussion was the theological dispute between Lutherans, the Reformed Church, and Catholics and the irenicist effort to reunite the confessions that was sup- ported by Molanus, Leibniz, and influential aristocrats in Hanover and in Prussia, Sophia among them. Sophia’s correspondence is extensive; her memoirs are equally fascinating (she traveled frequently and spent a year in Italy), yet have received relatively little scholarly attention outside of parochial or dynastic history. The editions available in French (1990), German (1913 and 1927), and English (1888) are all partial excerpts of the vast archival material in the Niedersächsische Staatsarchiv and in the Leibniz Bibliothek in Hanover. The second “Sophie” in Leibniz and the Two Sophies, the daughter of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, became Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia (1668–1705) and the grandmother of Frederic II, who in his Mémoires pour servir á l’Histoire de Brandebourg (1750) famously remarked that she “brought to Prussia the spirit of good society, true politeness, and the love of arts and sciences” (2). Sophie Charlotte was a highly gifted, intellectually curious, and educated woman who befriended Leibniz like her mother had done. Keenly interested in science, she was instrumental in the foundation of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. (After her early death at age thirty-six in 1705, her husband, the Prussian “Soldier King,” had most of her letters destroyed fearing negative remarks about him.) Several modern biographies aside, the historian Jonathan I. Israel in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (2001) at best mentions in passing the two women’s patronage of Leibniz under the misleading heading “The Emancipation of Women.” Book Reviews 399 In contrast, Lloyd Strickland presents an expert selection from Leibniz’s correspondence with the two women; especially welcome is his attention and meticulous description of each letter’s archival source and status (letter, draft, variant, or other source). These letters — altogether numbering about 750 — were private communications and not intended for publication (they first appeared in Klopp’s Leibniz edition in the 1880s); they also contain court and political news and gossip. This review- er regrets that none of this content is included in this edition, but under- standably Strickland concentrates on “the philosophical contributions of the two women” that interest philosophers and foregrounds “the voices of Sophie and Sophie Charlotte [which] are much harder to detect than those of, for example, Anne Conway or Margaret Cavendish, who com- posed entire philosophical treatises” (4). Strickland also points out that much of the philosophical exchange took place in conversations; he stresses the communicative aspect in the development of Leibniz’s philosophy. This edition with its fine introduction and translations certainly contributes to the recognition of Leibniz’s philosophical discourse with his patronesses, who thus gain importance in their own right. It presents a readable alterna- tive to the monumental, critical Akademie-Ausgabe of Leibniz’s correspon- dence of which to date twenty-four volumes of his political and historical, four volumes of his philosophical, and seven volumes of his mathematical, scientific, and technical correspondence have been published, covering (only) the years 1663–1702. Leibniz and the Two Sophies is a valuable and manageable complement to the Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (1923-) with its multiple volumes in eight (!) series and to the flood of partial editions of Leibniz’s writings in several languages. Barbara Becker-Cantarino The Ohio State University, Columbus.
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