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Enthusiasm is desirable, yet dangerous. More than just affective intensity, it entails belief. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, this book explores different styles of religious enthusiasm in Modern Germany, inflected by historical traditions and social milieus, in an effort to understand the modern ambivalence toward this feeling.
List of contents
- Introduction: Enthusiasm as an Emotional Practice
- 1: Emotional Ideologies: A Brief Archeology of Terms and Theories
- 2: Safeguarding Interiority: Debates over Protestant Enthusiasm in Nineteenth-Century Germany
- 3: Free to Follow the Feeling: Doubt as Material Practice
- 4: Styles of Sincerity: On the Morality of Performances of Enthusiasm
- 5: Enchanting Conviction: 'Enthusiasm' as an Analytical Term
- Conclusion: Awkward Enthusiasts: Emotionalizing Atheism in Berlin
About the author
Monique Scheer is Professor of Historical and Cultural Anthropology (Empirische Kulturwissenschaft) at the University of Tübingen, where she also serves as Vice-Rector for International Affairs. Most recently, she has co-edited Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2019) with Nadia Fadil and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen and The Public Work of Christmas: Difference and Belonging in Multicultural Societies (McGill-Queens UP, 2019) with Pamela E. Klassen. She is also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Ethnologia Europaea and on the editorial board of Geschichte and Gesellschaft.
Summary
Enthusiasm is desirable, yet dangerous. More than just affective intensity, it entails belief. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, this book explores different styles of religious enthusiasm in Modern Germany, inflected by historical traditions and social milieus, in an effort to understand the modern ambivalence toward this feeling.
Additional text
This amazing book offers a fresh historical-ethnographic exploration of the emotional styles deployed in the Protestant spectrum and their — barely realized — embodied sediments in secular emotional registers and sensibilities in Germany. This insightful analysis of Protestantism's role in shaping how people "do" emotions is of major interest not only for scholars of religion, but for anyone seeking to understand the power of emotional styles in mobilizing people. Deploying "enthusiasm" as a productive concept to analyse how people become dedicated to a cause and convinced of a sense of truth, Monique Scheer opens up new vistas for the scholarship on religion and emotion beyond the secular-religious divide. Wow!
