Enlightenment Underground

Online supplement, "Mulsow:
Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem
Untergrund": full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in
the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik
Midelfort's website.

Martin Mulsow’s seismic
reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its
original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book
available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow
shows that even in the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express
extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript
collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown
radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the
secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works
circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books.

Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of
several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were
connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author
reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews,
church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university
students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to
unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This
landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious,
conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far
more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected.