Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany

Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany

"It is not sufficiently appreciated, I believe, how profoundly Clio, the muse of history, permeated every aspect of thought during the Romantic era: philosophy, theology, law, natural science, medicine, and all other fields of intellectual endeavor.... Thoughtful students of the period well understand that 'Romanticism' is not merely a literary or aesthetic movement but, rather, a general climate of opinion."―from the Introduction In a book certain to be of interest to readers in many disciplines, the distinguished scholar Theodore Ziolkowski shows how a strong impulse toward historical concerns was formalized in the four German academic faculties: philosophy, theology, law, and medicine/biology. In Clio the Romantic Muse , he focuses on representative figures in whose early work the sense of history was first manifested: G. W. F. Hegel, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Through biographical treatments of these and other leading German scholars, Ziolkowski traces how the disciplines became historicized in the period 1790–1810. He goes on to suggest how powerfully the Romantic thinkers influenced their disciples in the twentieth century. Clio the Romantic Muse is an important and timely book for scholars of religion with a particular interest in the current (and perennial) debates about the constitution of religious studies as a discipline and its relationship to its multifarious institutional settings.... Ziolkowski finally asks rhetorically whether 'a familiarity with an earlier society whose experience was strikingly analogous to our own might provide both a model and a caution for our situation.' For scholars of religion burdened with disquieting questions about the future of the discipline, the answer is assuredly affirmative. -- David L. Simmons ― The Journal of Religion In his conclusion, Ziolkowski shows how the Romantics, prompted by the crisis of their age, looked at the world in a new way and used a historical approach to counter its dangers. Considering their response could help us to cope with our present-day global problems. Regrettably, no brief summary can do justice to this valuable and learned book. -- Hans Reiss ― Modern Language Review Ziolkowski's book is a highly readable account of how a 'new sense of history' restructured different academic disciplines in nineteenth-century Germany. -- Catherine Grimm ― German Quarterly This book by Theodore Ziolkowski traces the impact of the rise of historical thinking in Germany during the Romantic era on the traditional academic faculties―philosophy, theology, law, and medicine―at the newly founded University of Berlin. The subsequent development of the humanities in the modern university was profoundly influenced by this fundamental paradigm shift in the study of history. Ziolkowski's important book demonstrates the debt we still owe to the work of the leading academic practitioners of romantic historicism, such as Hegel, Savigny, and Schleiermacher. -- Cyrus Hamlin, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Yale University Theodore Ziolkowski is Class of 1900 Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Among his many books are The Mirror of Justice and The Sin of Knowledge.