Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications Philosophy, Department of 4-1-2001 Review of Jena Romanticism and the Appropriation of Jakob Böhme by Paola Mayer Michael Vater Marquette University,
[email protected] Published version. Journal of the History of Philosophy Vol. 39, No. 2 (2001): 307-308. DOI. © 2001 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc. Reprinted with permission by The oJ hns Hopkins University Press. BOOK REVIEWS 307 Mayer, Paola.Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation ofJakob Bijhme: Theosophy, Hagiography, Literature. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas, no. 25. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 242. Cloth, $65.00. Paolo Mayer sets out to revise the accepted image of the influence of Jakob B6hme, the sixteenth-century mystic and theosophist, on the romantic poets and philosophers who congregated at Jena in the years 1798-1803. She convincingly argues that, ex cept for the philosophers and critics Friedrich Schlegel and F. W. J. Schelling, B6hme's direct influence was negligible, more a matter of the self-proclaimed new religion of romanticism making ideological use of a controversial, in some sense sub versive, forerunner in German literary history. In the hands of Ludwig Tieck, for instance, or Novalis, B6hme becomes a symbol of the new religion of Poesie and the hostile reception afforded by the orthodox evangelical pastors of his time becomes an allegory for the hostility that the new, "let it all hang out" aesthetic of romanticism encountered in the more classical and form-loving members of the literary culture.